Darkness, Take My Hand (Kenzie & Gennaro 2)
Page 59“That was fifteen or twenty years ago,” she said.
“Twenty,” Bolton said.
“Why didn’t you recognize my name?” I said. “You knew my father.”
She cocked her head, looked at me as if I’d just claimed she was a long-lost sister.
“I never knew your father, Mr. Kenzie.”
I pointed at the photo. “There he is, Doctor Warren. Standing a foot away from your husband.”
“That’s your father?” She stared at the photo.
“Yes. And that’s Jack Rouse beside him. And just over his left shoulder, that’s Kevin Hurlihy’s mother.”
“I didn’t…” She peered at the faces. “I didn’t know these people by name, Mr. Kenzie. I took this photo because Stan asked me to. This silly group was something he was involved with, not me. I wouldn’t even allow them to have meetings at our house.”
“Why not?” Devin said.
She sighed and waved a frail hand. “All that macho posturing under the guise of community service. It was so ridiculous. Stan would try to convince me how good it would look on his résumé, but he was no different than the rest, forming a street gang and calling it socially benevolent.”
Bolton said, “Our records indicate that you filed for separation from Mr. Timpson in November of nineteen seventy-four. Why?”
She shrugged and yawned into her fist.
“Jesus Christ,” she said sharply. “Jesus Christ.” She looked up at us and for a moment life returned to her, and then just as suddenly dissipated. She dropped her head into her hands and limp strands of hair fell over her fingers.
“Stanley,” she said, “showed his true colors that summer. He was a Roman basically, convinced of his own moral superiority. He’d come home with blood on his shoe from kicking some unlucky car thief and try to tell me it was about justice. He became ugly…sexually, as if I were no longer his wife but his purchased courtesan. He changed from an essentially decent man with some unanswered questions about his manhood into a storm trooper.” She stabbed her finger into the photo. “And it was this group that caused it. This ridiculous, silly group of fools.”
“Was there any one particular incident that you can recall, Doctor Warren?”
“In what way?”
“Did he ever tell you war stories?” Devin said.
“No. Not after we fought about the blood on his shoe that time.”
“And you’re sure it was a car thief’s blood?”
She nodded.
“Doctor Warren,” I said and she looked up at me, “if you were estranged from Timpson, why did you help the DA’s office during the Hardiman trial?”
“Stan had nothing to do with the case. He was prosecuting prostitutes in night court back then. I had helped the DA’s office once before when a defendant was claiming insanity, and they liked the result, so they asked me to interview Alec Hardiman. I found him to be sociopathic, given to delusions of grandeur, and paranoid, but legally sane, fully aware of the difference between right and wrong.”
“Was there any connection between EEPA and Alec Hardiman?” Oscar said.
She shook her head. “None that I ever knew of.”
She shrugged. “I think they just got bored. I really don’t know. I’d moved out of the neighborhood by then. Stan followed a few months later.”
“There’s nothing else you can remember from that time?”
She stared at the photograph for a long time.
“I remember,” she said wearily, “that when I took this picture I was pregnant, and I was feeling nauseous that day. I told myself it was the heat and the baby growing inside me. But it wasn’t. It was them.” She pushed the photo away. “There was a sickness to that group, a corruption. I had the feeling, as I took this picture, that they’d hurt someone very badly some day. And like it.”
In the RV, Fields removed his headphones and looked at Bolton. “The prison shrink, Doctor Dolquist, has been trying to reach Mr. Kenzie. I can patch him through.”
Bolton nodded, turned to me. “Put it on speaker.”
I answered the phone on the first ring.
“Mr. Kenzie? Ron Dolquist.”
“Doctor Dolquist,” I said, “may I put you on speaker phone?”
“Certainly.”
I did, and his voice picked up a metallic quality, as if it were bouncing off several satellites at once.
“Mr. Kenzie, I’ve spent a lot of time going over all the notes I’ve kept of my sessions with Alec Hardiman over the years, and I think I may have stumbled on something. Warden Lief tells me you believe Evandro Arujo is working on the outside at Hardiman’s behest?”
“Have you considered the possibility that Evandro has a partner?”
There were eight of us packed in the RV, and we all looked at the speaker simultaneously.
“Why would you say that, Doctor?”
“Well, it was something I’d forgotten about, but the first few years he was here, Alec spent a lot of time talking about someone named John.”
“John?”
“Yes. At the time, Alec was working hard to have his conviction overturned on the grounds of insanity, and he pulled out all the stops to convince the psychiatric staff that he was delusional, paranoid, schizophrenic, you name it. This John, I believed, was just his attempt to establish multiple personality syndrome. After nineteen seventy-nine, he never mentioned him again.”
Bolton leaned over my shoulder. “What changed your mind, Doctor?”
“Agent Bolton? Oh. Well, at the time I did allow for the possibility that John was a manifestation of his own personality—a fantasy Alec, if you will, who could walk through walls, disappear in mist, that sort of thing. But as I went through my notes last night, I kept coming upon references to a trinity, and I recalled that he’d told you, Mr. Kenzie, that you’d be transformed into a ‘man of impact’ by—”
“The ‘Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,’” I said.
“Yes. Often, when Alec spoke of this John, he called him Father John. Alec would be the son. And the ghost—”
“Arujo,” I said. “He vanishes into mist.”
“Exactly. Alec’s grasp of the true meaning of the Blessed Trinity leaves a lot to be desired, but it’s like a lot of mythological and religious imagery with him—he takes what he needs and molds it to suit his purposes, tosses out the rest.”