I managed to keep my tone businesslike. “That’s great.” I took a quick shot.

  “You’d better take a few,” he suggested. “Just in case some of them don’t turn out well. I’m not sure if the camera likes me.” He was a liar. He seemed utterly confident that he would photograph well. I snapped two more shots of him like that. Then he sat down on his bed, leaning forward, his fingers entwined in front of him, and he looked up at me with a contemplative expression. “How about a couple like this?”

  Yes, that was a good idea. I nodded and got three more shots of him in that position. Then he stood and came up to the bars, grasping them with his hands and leaned his head against one of them. He towered nearly a foot above me. Closer to me than before, his hypnotic, blue eyes pierced through me; their color a vibrant, unearthly shade of blue. Mesmerized, I just gazed at him for several moments until I heard him clear his throat and say, “Miss Reis, why don’t you get a couple of close-ups now.”

  In a fog of confusion, I slowly lifted the camera up and took three more pictures of him. Then I thanked him for his time and said goodbye. His eyes followed me as I ambled up the hallway. Feeling lightheaded and giddy, I checked out of the prison and walked back to my car.

  Chapter 6

  “Well, how did it go?” Andrea asked. She had called my cell before I’d even left the penitentiary parking lot.

  “It didn’t.”

  “You didn’t get in?”

  “I got in. I spoke with Eisenbrey, but I just don’t feel like I got anywhere with him. He doesn’t like me.”

  “So? This guy kills people for kicks. Did you expect him to be nice to you?” She had a point. “You can’t count on success your first time with him. It may take a few more visits before he starts to open up.”

  “He was so rude and arrogant,” I complained. “He’s just such an asshole.” I didn’t mention the photo shoot to Andrea, or that I had gotten an unusual lightheaded feeling from it, or that with only a few minutes of flirtation Eisenbrey had somehow managed to make my hormone levels go apeshit. I wasn’t exactly sure what had just happened, but now that I sat in my car and replayed the scene in my head, I felt like an idiot.

  “Look, Rebecca, I want you to do a few more interviews before you try to weasel out of it. Give it a chance. You should enter into this expecting him to be a mean son of a bitch. Perhaps you’ll get lucky and be pleasantly surprised.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” She had proven herself correct about a lot of things over the years. It made sense to listen to Andrea. “I already have the next appointment set for Monday.”

  “Good! So he agreed to see you again. Things are looking up.”

  As I sped down I-90, across the vast expanse of Eastern Washington’s desert landscape, I started kicking around ideas for my to-do list. I should ask Eisenbrey for names of any friends or relatives I could interview. He’d mentioned his mother, who didn’t speak to him anymore, but that was all I had so far. I would also need to interview the victim’s family members and some of the prison guards.

  My mind conjured an image of Detective Scanlon’s smiling face. I definitely needed to interview him again, soon. He was easy to chat with, easy to smile for—such a contrast from Eisenbrey. And he’d said to call him, anytime. The idea was appealing. It had only been two days since he’d extended that invitation. Was it too soon to call? No clue. I didn’t want to appear too enthusiastic. But, on the other hand, this was clearly work related.

  I caught motion in my peripheral vision, checked my rearview mirror, and saw someone sitting in the back seat of my car. I shrieked and jerked the steering wheel, causing my car to swerve, narrowly missing a collision with an SUV. Then I chanced another peek in the mirror as I pulled over to the side of the freeway, but saw no one this time.

  Jesus! The fucker probably ducked down where I can’t see him.

  My car skidded to a stop and I tore the door open, jumped out, and looked into the side window to see the back seat. It was empty.

  I couldn’t understand. There was nothing in my back seat: no coat, no blanket, no shopping bags—absolutely nothing a person could hide under. It was completely barren. And I had definitely seen someone…hadn’t I?

  My heart pounded in my chest, as I paced next to my car. Less sure now, I tried to recall what this person had looked like. It seemed like a man, but I couldn’t remember any of his features. All I had really seen was a dark shape. I looked in the car again. The day was sunny; the back seat well lit. There was absolutely no reason I wouldn’t have been able to see a passenger with clarity. Had I imagined it?

  My eyes rested on the lock release button by the headrest. The back seat could fold down to allow access from the cabin into the trunk. My breath came out in a gush. Crap. I need to search the trunk.

  A thought came to me. Was this person armed? Could someone have climbed into my car while I was parked at the prison? If so, why had they waited so long to show themselves? My commute had started more than an hour ago.

  It was a little after three o’clock. Looking around, I saw a steady stream of cars driving by. If I found trouble, someone would pull over to help. I reached in the driver’s door and pulled the trunk release. Then I walked to the rear of the car and whipped the trunk open, jumping back and to the side to avoid any maniac that might jump out at me. It was empty.

  I felt like an ass.

  In the trunk, there was nothing but my hiking boots and a backpack with emergency supplies—far too small to secret the object of my terror—no need to open it and look for him. It seemed obvious that my mind was playing tricks on me. But that dark figure had seemed so solid, so real. Perhaps, my visit with Eisenbrey had spooked me more than I realized.

  When I got home, I loaded the photos into my laptop and set them up as a slideshow. Then I picked a favorite, one of the shots where he hung onto the bars of his cell and peered through at me; the last one I had taken. A damned good-looking man, it felt difficult to draw my eyes away from his picture. I set that photo up as the wallpaper on my laptop. It gave me a guilty feeling, as if I was looking at a dirty magazine. I was almost acting like some smitten teenager. What a ridiculous thought. In fact, I distinctly remembered that I had disliked him the moment we met. This had nothing to do with fondness. My new wallpaper photo was nothing more than an aid to help me with my writing.

  Eisenbrey stared from my screen with his deep cerulean eyes, and I could feel something stirring inside of me. I was beginning to creep myself out. “Stop staring at me,” I whispered, and I snapped my laptop shut.

  I spent the next couple days listening to the recording I made of him over and over as I typed notes about our interview. I enjoyed the sound of his voice, deep and masculine. I looked at the pictures of him several more times as well, just to help me get into the right frame of mind to write.

  I immersed myself in him so much that he should have seemed like a pest, yet when I tried to take a break and concentrate on something else, a strange craving for something I couldn’t identify would nag me. I found myself in the kitchen, removing the whiskey from the cupboard and setting it on the counter, out of habit I suppose. Later, back in my living room I realized I didn’t have a drink. I hadn’t poured one. I didn’t particularly want one.

  Much to my frustration, that Saturday and Sunday night I spent an inordinate amount of time awake, unable to rid my mind of Thomas Eisenbrey.

  Chapter 7

  October 29th, 2012

  I had found him lying face-down on the beige carpet—the carpet they had purchased less than one year earlier. They were particular about keeping it clean, so much so that they took their shoes off before entering the house. A large dark red bloodstain soaked into the rug next to his head, and the crimson saturated the beautiful, silver hair that had always looked so shiny whenever he stood out in the California sunshine. I worried that the left side of his head would never look right again. But even as that silly thought raced through my mind, I knew he lay there unconcerned. He wasn’t worried about anything anymore. My eyes traveled to the wall close to him where more blood had splattered in a misshapen fan pattern. No. I needed to clean him up. I needed to fix this. I needed to make this go away.

  “Jesus!” I said as my eyes jerked open. I glanced around realizing that I’d dozed off in my car after parking. I was at the prison. It was Monday. Time for my second meeting with Eisenbrey. I had arrived thirty minutes early and decided to close my eyes for a few minutes. That had been a mistake. In my defenseless moment the memory had forced its way in. The ghosts had free reign.

  Familiar feelings of emptiness and despair surfaced. I took a deep breath and rubbed my temples, trying to chase away some of the remaining grogginess without ruining my make-up. Then I got up and hurried into the prison.

  When I came into the control booth in Eisenbrey’s section, Lutz greeted me, and then introduced me to the other man at the desk, DiMaggio. Officer DiMaggio had one of those ageless faces; he could have been anywhere between thirty and fifty years old. I felt reasonably sure that he had spent a lot of time in the military before coming to the prison, a conclusion drawn in part because of his appearance, but mostly because of his demeanor. He looked like an extremely disciplined man. DiMaggio nodded, but didn’t smile. It was hard to tell if he was radiating hostility toward me, or if I was dealing with someone who was just not overly friendly.

  Lutz got up to escort me to Eisenbrey’s cell, but then DiMaggio said, “Hang on a second, Andy. I’ll take her back. I haven’t had a chance to visit my little buddy yet today.” Lutz looked a little put out by this, but he stepped aside. The way the young man’s eyes cast downward screamed at me that he had no intention of fucking with the other guard. I followed DiMaggio back to the cell. As the outer door slid open he said, “Hey Asshole, you’re girl’s here to see you. Ain’t that great?”

  Eisenbrey casually lay on his bed, reading a section of newspaper. He did not look up or acknowledge DiMaggio, and it got under the guard’s skin.

  “You’d better answer me when I speak to you,” he yelled as he struck the outer door causing a ricochet of sound down the hall. “Or I’ll take your clothes and your sheets and you can just sit here naked in the cold and think about how you should have shown me some respect.”

  Eisenbrey lifted his eyes slowly to look up at the guard who glared down at him. “Relax, Ricky. I respect you just as much today as I always have.” His attention returned to his newspaper.

  “I told you not to call me that, Eisenbrey, and there will be a consequence.” He turned to me, “So, you’re doing a biography about this corpse-fucking piece of shit? I wonder just how many dead bodies he’s raped. He really gets off on that sort of thing.”

  Eisenbrey spoke up. “Well actually, Ricky, I am not sexually attracted to dead people. They don’t scream like the live ones do, and that’s what really turns me on.” I saw a wicked gleam in his eyes. “But, I’ll bet the sight of your corpse would give me a great big hard-on.”

  It felt uncomfortable standing here while these two exchanged unpleasantries, but I was gaining some valuable information about what life must be like for him in prison. I couldn’t understand how DiMaggio had the nerve to antagonize Eisenbrey that way. It seemed unwise to provoke a dangerous killer. He might be secure in his cell at the moment, but surely this guard would have to deal with him face to face at some point during the course of his duties.

  DiMaggio rapped the steel bars with his baton; the sound again reverberated around the hall. “That’s twice, you fucking piece of shit. Now there’s gonna be two consequences.” Then he gave me a mirthless smile and said, “You two have a nice visit now.” He strolled back to the guard booth, grinning as if he had been triumphant in that exchange, but I couldn’t tell who the winner had been. I suppose that would depend on what these mysterious consequences turned out to be.

  “Holy shit, he seems like a real sweetheart,” I said. “Do you think he’s really going to do something bad to you?” I set the recorder on the floor between us and looked at Eisenbrey who nodded his consent. I flipped it on.

  “I don’t care what that puffed up little man does.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Where’s that photo you promised me, Sugar?”

  I had hoped that he wouldn’t remember, but I came prepared. “Oh, I should have given it to the officer before he left,” I said, looking back in the direction DiMaggio had just gone.

  “Hold it up toward the camera,” he told me.

  I did, and a few moments later Lutz appeared. I breathed a sigh of relief that it wasn’t the other guard again. “Got something for Tom?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, handing Lutz the 8” x 10” sheet. In the photo I wore a simple black dress and a choker with a decorative jade carving in front. It was a classy shot, not flirtatious or slutty in any way. Lutz looked at it for quite a while. “I assume a photo like this is appropriate?”

  “Oh, we don’t care about that. Heck, it could even be a nudie. I’m just supposed to check to make sure there aren’t any paperclips or staples—that sort of thing.” He shrugged and then slid the paper through the food tray slot in the cell door and stepped back.

  “Thanks Andy,” Tom murmured as he took the photo.

  Lutz nodded and walked back to his station. The farther away the young guard went, the more my tension increased. Paperclips or staples? Were those things supposed to be dangerous in some way? The idea seemed nuts, but I supposed a violent and resourceful man could fashion weapons out of them.

  I felt my heart-rate increase. I was out of sorts, probably because I hadn’t consumed any alcohol before our visit today. Or was it more than that? Yes. I was bothered that Eisenbrey now had an image of me. It seemed sinister.

  I sat down on the metal chair and took a spiral notebook out of my bag. He looked at my hand and I sensed he had noticed the slight tremble in my fingers. His eyes lingered on me for a moment. He chuckled and nodded, but didn’t otherwise acknowledge the uneasy demeanor that I attempted to hide.

  Eisenbrey returned his gaze to the photo, sizing me up on paper the same way that he did in person. “This is very nice. Thank you.” Then he set it down carefully on the table and sat on his bed.

  “You’ll be pleased to know that I’ve read all of your novels since our last meeting.”

  That surprised me. None of my books were short. It was quite a bit to read over one weekend.

  “I enjoyed the first two. However, your third effort… well, should we really call that an effort? I was left with the impression that you just didn’t care anymore. What were you aiming for- frightening? Suspenseful? Creepy? Whatever it was, you missed your mark.” He shook his head, feigning disappointment. Or perhaps it was genuine. I wasn’t sure. “You know, I could teach you a thing or two about creepy if you want…” he promised, his voice drifting off. He studied me for a moment and asked, “Are you sure you’re up to this?”

  “Pretty sure I can handle it,” I said dryly.

  “Literary critics can be so vicious, especially the ones who reviewed your work. Things must be difficult for you lately, with your career going up in flames the way it has. Are you under a lot of pressure now to prove that you can still write?” I hated the uncanny way he had of saying what I was thinking. “I don’t have a lot of confidence in you, Rebecca. Do you?”

  “Don’t kid yourself Mr. Eisenbrey, I’ve risen from the ashes, but this book isn’t going to happen if you spend all of our limited time lobbing insults at me. At some point today we’re going to need to have another chat about you.” He studied me silently as I stared right back. “Do you want me to write this book or not?”

  He kept silent for a little while with his eyebrows raised. “Hmm. I’m beginning to think that we might be a good fit, Rebecca. Yes, I do want you to write it.” Then he leaned back on his bed and said, “All right, let’s talk about me, darlin’. Fire away.”

  I consulted my list of questions and said, “I forgot to confirm your date of birth at our last visit. Is July 12, 1967 correct?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “You’re a very beautiful woman, Rebecca. I didn’t realize just how beautiful the first time we met. It looks like you took a little more care getting ready for me this time. You spent more time on your eye makeup and you’re wearing a bra that pushes up your tits. I like that.”

  I held my palm up to him. “Whoa, what the fuck?” The most infuriating thing was that he was right about all of it. I had spent a great deal of time trying to look nice for him. At least his unpleasantness seemed to be taking the edge off of my jitters.

  “Oh come now, Rebecca, don’t complain. You know I don’t have anything else to look forward to besides screwing with you. Why would you want to deny me that one small pleasure?”

  I merely shook my head and forged onward. “So you’re forty-five years old?” I said absentmindedly, looking over my questions to get my bearings.

  “Yes, but that’s something that we both already knew. How old are you?” he asked. He noted my hesitation, then he added, “Come on, it’s only fair now, isn’t it?”

  “I’m forty,” I told him.

  He leapt up from his bed and came toward me with surprising speed and agility, causing me to flinch, then peered at me through the bars of his cell. “Now, that I do not believe.”

  “It’s true. I’m past my prime. So perhaps we can dispense with your ridiculous attraction to me and get some actual work done.”

  “No, no, no…We can’t dispense with that at all. Not at all…” He examined my face with a fervid interest that I found alarming, as if I was bacteria on a slide under the lens of a high-powered microscope. I squirmed. Part of me wanted to put a great deal of distance between myself and this nutjob as quickly as possible, but that wouldn’t help me get the information I needed for my book. Instead, I took a deep breath and tried to relax while he stared at me.

  “Have you been under the knife, Rebecca?” he asked. I shuddered as I had an involuntary vision of Eisenbrey slitting the throat of a hunter that was duct taped to a tree, and I felt grateful I wasn’t under his knife. “If so, your plastic surgeon is very good.”

 

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