All she wanted in this world was to take care of him. He’d been through so much and she wanted to make it right again. To make him see her for once, instead of Abby.
And just when she thought he was making progress, this woman — this street person — comes along and ruins it.
Each time Lisa had been out here, she’d hoped to see Michael’s Lexus coming back up the hill. But all she’d found was a sea of parked cars, glinting in the sunlight. No sign of human activity, except during her last trip, when a couple of police officers escorted an old black man toward the EDU.
The old man had smiled at her as they passed, a knowing twinkle in his eyes. “You look like a woman in search of a lost soul,” he’d said.
And as surprised as Lisa had been, she couldn’t dispute his words.
Michael was, in effect, just that. A lost soul.
Her lost soul.
“But why?” Carmody said, staring down at the list again. “Why would he do that? He had to know we’d find out. He gave us permission to pull these records, for godsakes.”
Blackburn nodded. “I told you. He’s just like that perp who wants to confess, but can’t quite bring himself to do it. So he has some make-believe phantom do it for him.”
Carmody shook her head. “I don’t know, Frank. Making up phone calls is pretty crazy, and throwing together that website is even crazier, but none of it means he killed his wife. Maybe he’s just an attention whore, like that idiot who confessed to killing JonBenet Ramsey.”
“Maybe.”
“And what about Janovic?” she said.
“What about him?”
“Even if we entertain the notion that Tolan had something to do with his wife’s death, how does Janovic fit into the equation? Is his murder just a coincidence? Did Vincent kill him? Or is that Tolan playing copycat too?”
Blackburn hesitated. “I haven’t figured that part out yet.”
“Surprise, surprise.”
“But you know me and coincidences. Maybe he was after Jane, and Janovic got in the way.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Carmody said. “From what you’ve told me, it sounds like the killer was interrupted by Jane. And why would Tolan kill his wife, wait a whole year, then go after some street whore?”
“Like I said, maybe she isn’t just a street whore. Maybe she knows Tolan. She might even be related to him.”
“Related? How?”
“I don’t know, but she looks a lot like the wife. Maybe they’re cousins or something. Sisters. When she started singing, he immediately recognized the tune, like it was an old family favorite or something. I thought he was gonna crap his pants.”
“You’re forgetting something,” Carmody said.
“What?”
“The burn marks. The smiley face. How could Tolan know about that?”
And there it was. The same old stumbling block.
“Maybe it got leaked somehow.”
Carmody shook her head. “No way. The task force kept that one under tight lock and key.”
“Try telling that to the idiots who prosecuted O.J. They’d laugh in your face.”
She stared at him. “Come on, Frank, I’m hearing a lot of ‘maybes’ but no concrete proof. One of the few things I’ve always admired about you is that when it comes to cases, you never jump to conclusions. You always follow the best evidence.”
“You’re right,” Blackburn said.
And she was. Left-handed compliment or not. He had never been the type to finger a suspect then look for evidence to back it up, ignoring all to the contrary. He had always looked to the facts of a case to point him toward a suspect.
But when a storm comes along and you get hit by a bolt of lightning, it tends to jangle the brain, mix things up. And these cell phone records and Tolan’s bizarre behavior had certainly seeded the clouds.
Not to mention the photographs he’d found in Tolan’s office.
“He did it,” Blackburn said. “Two times four is a lie.”
“The babbling of a sick woman. It means nothing.”
“She saw something, Sue. I don’t know what it was, but now we’ve got Tolan in the middle of a meltdown, caught in a complete fabrication. It’s all connected somehow. It’s gotta be.” He paused. “And then there’s these.”
Reaching into his pocket again, he pulled out the second stack of snapshots he’d taken from the envelope in Tolan’s desk drawer. Shoving his tray aside, he laid them out in front of her.
Six photos. Each a shot of Abby Tolan. At the beach. The park. On the street. Standing in her gallery. And she was smiling for the camera. A radiant smile.
But in every single photo, there was one thing missing.
Carmody stared down at them, the color draining from her face. “My God…”
My God, indeed, Blackburn thought.
Someone had gone through them, one by one—
— and cut out Abby Tolan’s eyes.
“Tell me now the sonofabitch didn’t kill her.”
32
He couldn’t move his arms and legs.
He had awakened to near darkness, lying on his back, on a table of some kind, slanted slightly toward the floor, his wrists and ankles strapped down.
Four-point restraints.
A small patch of light bled in through a crack in the wall, giving him just enough illumination to get a sense of his surroundings. He was in a windowless room that smelled of mold and burned wood and plaster.
The ornate light fixture mounted on the blackened ceiling above him was cracked and broken, with missing bulbs. Whatever this place was, it had been abandoned decades ago.
The old hospital? He couldn’t be sure.
The drug he had been given still sluiced through his veins, slowing his thought processes, but its effects were starting to wear off.
Something was stuck to the sides of his head, to his temples — pieces of tape, perhaps. But as his brain began to clear, he realized it wasn’t just tape… but disposable electrodes.
What exactly was going on here?
If he had to guess — and he supposed that was all he could do — he’d say he had been prepped for some kind of sleep study.
Which made no sense. He wasn’t at Baycliff, wasn’t even in a fully functioning structure as far as he could tell. There were no doctors here, no technicians, no hospital staff at all. He was alone. Alone with the darkness and the faint, muffled hum of a motor.
A generator of some kind?
He couldn’t be sure. But the sound was familiar to him. Much like the rumble of the ten-gallon trifuel his parents had used to power their cabin near Arrowhead Springs so many years ago.
He didn’t often think about those days. The months they’d spent up in the mountains, away from the rest of the world, as his mother tried to deal with one of her many “episodes.” She had become cruel and unmanageable, and his father had been at his wit’s end trying to look after her. Tolan didn’t find out until years later that she had been suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder, but he was certain that her illness was what had spurred him to become a psychiatrist.
He heard another sound. The squeak of rusty wheels. Then a door creaked open, muted sunlight momentarily slicing through the room, giving him a glimpse of charred furniture and broken glass cabinets.
A figure was silhouetted in the doorway. Judging by the size, it was a man, and he was pushing a cart, a cart loaded with a small, boxy piece of machinery. Hard to tell in the dim light, but it looked like an ECT instrument.
Fear blossomed in Tolan’s stomach.
A moment later, the door closed again, returning the room to near darkness. Then a whispery voice said: