“I didn’t mean that,” Karl said irritably. “I didn’t mean she’s dead.”
He came and knelt beside the chair, putting a hand on her arm.
“Please don’t cry so, Carey,” he said softly. “I didn’t mean for you to cry. You’re my angel.”
“Oh, my God,” Carey mumbled behind her hands.
“It’s just that you’re with me now,” he explained. “You’re with me. You’re my angel.”
“Please stop saying that,” Carey said, her voice trembling. “The police will be looking for me, you know.”
“That don’t matter,” Karl said, matter-of-fact. “They got no idea where you are.”
“You’ll go to prison for the rest of your life if you hurt me. If you let me go-”
“They gotta catch me first,” Karl snapped. “And if they catch me, I’ll go to prison for the rest of my sorry life no matter what. Now, I don’t want to hear no more about it.”
He went to another grocery bag and pulled out one of David’s exotic beers.
For Christmas the year before, Carey had signed him up for the Beer of the Month Club. That was the only thing she’d given him he hadn’t had some complaint about.
The memory of a better Christmas was the two of them the second Christmas after they had married. They were having a party. Mistletoe had made the rounds, courtesy of one of their friends. She saw David laughing, trim and fit and handsome; herself laughing too, leaning against him with her hand on the flat of his belly. He was holding a poinsettia over his head and had told her that the poinsettia-being that much larger than mistletoe-meant they had to go upstairs and make a baby. And so they had, after their guests had gone home. They had been so happy.
“You want something to drink?” Karl asked.
Carey just stared at him.
He brought her a bottle of Fiji water and a couple of Triscuits with summer sausage. Hors d’oeuvres. She took a sip of the water. It went down like a rock in her aching throat. She shook her head at the food.
She probably should have eaten it. She hadn’t had a decent meal in three days. She needed strength if she was going to get out of this mess. But the idea of food made her want to gag.
She pulled the chenille throw around herself, shivered, and coughed.
“You should have a lie-down,” Karl said. “I know you wasn’t comfortable in that trunk. I’m sorry about that. And I’m sorry I had to choke you like I did. I had to do that so you wouldn’t make a fuss.”
He sat on a box, eating his lunch, as if this were a perfectly normal situation for him. Maybe it was.
“Where are you from, Karl?” she asked.
“ Kansas. But I ain’t been back there in a long time.”
“Why is that?”
He pretended not to have heard her, his little trick for avoiding a topic.
“What brought you to Minneapolis?”
“A train,” he said, and laughed and laughed.
“You like moving around from town to town?”
“It suits me,” he said, nodding. “Can’t stay in one place too long.”
“Why is that?”
His face darkened as he looked down at the knife he’d used to cut the sausage, a nine-inch boning knife Carey knew to be sharp enough to cut paper. “It’s just best to move on.”
Because he went from town to town murdering innocent people? The system had coughed up a record on Karl Dahl, but there was no way of knowing what he might have done and gotten away with. He was one of those people who drifted along below the radar.
No one wanted to pay any attention to men like Karl, the strange, the quiet, the disenfranchised. All the ordinary citizens, with jobs and mortgages and kids, wanted nothing more than for the Karl Dahls of the world to pass through and keep on going.
Karl might have quietly left a string of homicides in his wake as he’d moved from place to place. He could have been invisible, blending into the background, calling no attention to himself.
If not for the neighbor stupidly stepping out of his house to videotape the tornado bearing down on the city that fateful day, Karl Dahl might have walked away from the Haas massacre into the mists, hopped another train, and gone on to another state, and the Haas murders would have gone unsolved.
“Come on,” he said.
He abandoned his lunch and approached her again.
Carey sat very still, like a small prey animal afraid to move or breathe. He put a hand around her wrist and pulled her up out of the chair. Not roughly, but firmly.
“I made this nice bed for you,” he said. “I want you to lie down on it.”
She wouldn’t have thought it possible, but the sense of dread became heavier, more oppressive. She knew too much about what had been done to Marlene Haas.
Had it started like this? Karl fixating on the woman, deciding she was his angel because she had helped him out, then wanting to possess her physically and sexually, flying into a rage when she tried to reject him. The rage unleashing the demons that lived in his soul. The demons spinning themselves into a frenzy.
“Lie down now,” Karl ordered her as she stepped to the edge of the nest he had made for her. The idea of his touching her, forcing himself on her, was beyond revolting.
Afraid to antagonize him, Carey lowered herself to the floor, lay down on her side, curled into the fetal position. Karl sat down and put her head in his lap and stroked her hair.
“You sleep now, angel. We have all the time in the world.”
For what? she wondered. Did he think she would become his willing traveling companion? Or did he think that in death her soul would become his forever?
“You’re with me now. I haven’t had an angel in a long, long time.”
“You had an angel once?” she asked in a hushed voice. “What was her name?”
He didn’t answer the question. Finally, he said very softly, “I had an angel once.”
“What happened to her?” Carey asked.
Karl looked down into her face, expressionless. “She went to heaven… like angels do.”
57
CAREY HELD EVERY muscle in her body tight against the violent trembling shuddering through her. She closed her eyes and pretended to sleep while Karl Dahl continued to stroke her hair and whisper to her, “You are my perfect angel,” over… and over… and over.
She had no idea how much time passed. An hour that seemed like minutes. Minutes that seemed like an hour.
Questions of who his last angel had been played through her mind, the possibilities all bad. Men like Karl didn’t come from loving homes with doting parents. They came from unhappy childhoods. Absent or abusive father. A mother who either blamed the child for everything wrong in her life or clung to the son because of her abusive husband. The child learned the power of violence, and his only example of a man’s relationship with a woman was a terrible, distorted story laced with hate and self-loathing.
Some people would have pitied the Karl Dahls of the world. She pitied Karl the child, but a sad story was not license to commit murder. Carey knew plenty of people with similar backgrounds-cops, lawyers, social workers-who had suffered a Karl Dahl childhood but raised themselves above it, instead of succumbing to it.
But then she was a prosecutor by nature, and prosecutors tended to think in black-and-white. Good or Evil. Innocent or Guilty.
And as a judge, she was supposed to operate with a blindfold on.
She wondered about Karl’s last angel and what had happened to her. Did he consider his mother his angel, and had she died of old age or disease or her husband’s brutality? Had his angel been his teenage love? Or his first victim? Or his last victim?
Marlene Haas had been kind to him, had offered him work, had offered him food. He had returned her kindness with horror. Karl Dahl was not a man destined for happy endings.