“Kathy was asleep when he first attacked her,” I tell him, and in the front of my mind the lounge we sat in while she told me this starts to form, slowly at first, and soon I can smell the blood on my clothes and taste the last mouthful of beer. Kathy brought me into a world where evil happened and I had loaded my hands full of its treasures. I can see Landry sitting opposite me, but standing just over his left shoulder is Kathy. She’s so real I could touch her. But of course she’s not real. She’s a figment of my imagination. Guilt manifesting itself into a form in which it can haunt me. My head is hurting from the blows it’s taken lately, and I reach slowly up and to the bump from Sunday night, and Kathy fades a little as I rub it, but then comes back when I stop. A real ghost wouldn’t do that. One projected by my guilt would.
“I never heard anyone come in,” she says.
“I know you didn’t. It wasn’t your fault,” I say to my guilt, hoping in a way it could be more than that, hoping it really could be Kathy I’m talking to.
“Jesus, Feldman, you’ve lost me,” Landry says.
“I didn’t know what time it was, Charlie, maybe ten thirty, and I woke up as his hand pressed down against my mouth. I wanted to scream, but couldn’t. He held the tip of a knife next to my eye.”
“I killed him with that knife,” I say.
“Him? I’m not talking about this Cyris you’re going on about. I’m talking about the women. Which one did you kill first, Feldman?”
“I didn’t kill them,” I say. “I really didn’t kill them.”
Kathy is ignoring Landry because in her world he never existed and that’s the fundamental problem with homicide cops-it’s already too late when you need them. Kathy stares at me with remorse and pity. She has a drink in her hand. It’s the one she had before I showered to wash away the blood. She seems uninterested in the cabin. The cold doesn’t affect her. The back of my neck is alive with goose bumps. She isn’t a ghost. Isn’t my guilt. She’s a memory. Her words are the same words she told me.
“I could smell his skin. So vile. Like he hadn’t bathed in days. Strange, huh? I was choking on his odor. I was sure he had plans for me, but right at that moment the smell was all I could think about.”
“He broke into Kathy’s bedroom and abducted her,” I say.
“You killed her first?”
“He moved his knife to my throat. It trapped the smell and the taste in there. I was desperate for air and was starting to black out. Then he was promising me if I made a sound he would kill me. His eyes were so dark. So intense. I knew then that this man was pure evil. Have you ever seen pure evil, Charlie?”
“I once saw an episode of Melrose Place.” Kathy’s ghost smiles, and Landry looks at me as if I’ve completely lost it. Maybe I have.
“He told me his name was Cyris and I should remember it because I’d be calling it out over and over in the night. He told me to nod if I could remember that, so I nodded. I was so afraid and I thought he was going to kill me right there, but instead he backed away and tossed me some clothes. He ordered me to dress and I was happy to.”
“Answer the Goddamn question,” Landry says. “Who’d you kill first?”
“Cyris. He was the first one to die.”
“Tell me about the women. Tell me why you killed them.”
“Yes, Charlie, tell us why,” Kathy says, surprising me because it means she knows about Landry, and this is turning from a memory of a conversation into an actual conversation.
I close my eyes to try and hide from her and what I see is Cyris in the trees, Cyris with the metal stake and the knife, Cyris asking me if I wanted to join him. When I open my eyes I’m expecting to see Kathy has gone, but she hasn’t. She pours herself another invisible drink, then leans against a doorway that is nearly two days ago and at least sixty or so miles away.
“They weren’t meant to die,” I say. “Don’t you see? I saved them. I saved them.”
“From Cyris. Tell me what they did to make you kill them. Tell me.”
“I didn’t kill them.”
Kathy looks down at her ghostly feet. They are bare and I wonder if she can see the floor through them like I can. “I didn’t know he was going to take me away to hear me scream. I would have fought more had I known what my fate was going to be.”
“He took them from their houses to torture them,” I tell Landry. “He tied them to trees.”
“In the pasture you wrote about.”
“Things like this only happen to other people,” Kathy tells me, and she starts to fade.
“He forced her into a van, and that’s when she saw he had Luciana too. She was unconscious. She said that scared her the most.”
Kathy is nodding slowly, agreeing, fading quickly now.
“She said she knew at that point she was going to die.”
I try to imagine the terror she must have felt as Cyris forced her to walk through those trees, the horror of having Cyris carrying her unconscious friend with them. My fear of walking through those trees in the darkness later had been nothing in comparison. What would it be like to know you were being taken to your death? How would you feel knowing the rest of your short life would be lived out in immense pain and cruelty? I shudder at the thought of putting myself into her position. This is electric-chair material. Like being taken down a corridor there is no coming back from. I look at Landry’s bag and think of the Bible inside he told me was there. Could anybody in these situations really find comfort from one?
“He tied her up to a tree. He dumped Luciana on the ground. He didn’t know, but she had woken during the walk. He’d dumped her at the side of the clearing they were in. He was so focused on Kathy that he didn’t notice her inching away. Eventually she would run away and flag me down. As she was doing that, Cyris was telling Kathy that she was a mistress of evil. She said it was like being attacked by two different people. One moment he was calm, the next he was in a frenzy-only she was sure the frenzy was an act. She was positive he was calm the whole time.”
“An act? Even if I believed another man killed them, why would I believe he was acting in a frenzy just for the sake of acting? He had no audience.”
I tell him what Jo said. About an actor in a role. About him wanting the police to believe one thing when in fact it had been another. Then that scenario evolves a little. “Maybe he even only wanted to kill one of them, but by killing them both it looks more random, right? It looks like he picked two women and drove them into the woods to kill them in some ritualistic or crazed act. What if only one of them was a target? If he killed her then you would look for somebody more personal to the victim. Isn’t that how it goes? This way who do you look for? Some maniac?”
“And that’s what I found. You were Cyris when you killed them and you’re Feldman now that you got caught. You were right about the actor.”
“You’re wrong.”
He shakes his head. “There was a connection between the two, so I know you didn’t just pick their houses at random. You followed them first. Where did you first see them? The supermarket? The movies?”
“See? This is exactly what I said before. You’re not willing to hear anything that doesn’t fall in line with what you think happened.”
He holds his hand out and uncurls his fingers. The stake rolls out. It hits the ground and doesn’t bounce. It makes me jump. It makes me think of the way Kathy and Luciana died.
“Maybe you met them at a bar. They were friends out having a quiet drink, and you were the guy who kept hitting on them. In the end they figured out you wouldn’t leave them alone so they played along with you. You swapped names and numbers, only they gave you fake ones and you gave them your real one. You took it back after you followed them home and killed them.”
“There was no forced entry. How do you explain that?”
“Maybe you convinced them at the bar you were a nice guy and they took you home. Maybe they were drunk and asked you for a lift. You had your bag of tools in the trunk and you just couldn’t say no. They let you inside and the rest is obvious.”