The Watcher in the Wall, page 11
Windermere looked over her shoulder at Stevens, the elevator doors still closed, the damn car taking its time. “What is it with you two?” she said. “Every time I turn around, you’re asking me to talk. You have something you want to say to me, Derek?”
Mathers looked at Stevens, too. “We’re just worried,” he said. “This case—it’s messed up. I think it’s messing with all of us.”
The elevator doors dinged at last. Mercifully. “This is me you’re talking to,” Windermere told him. “I don’t get messed up.”
She turned for the doors. “I gotta go, buddy. Try not to miss me too much.”
She walked away, joined Stevens in the elevator, stared at the bank of buttons until the doors slid closed, until the car was dropping toward street level. Rode down to the lobby in silence. Rode out to the airport more or less the same way.
< 48 >
You haven’t told anyone about us, have you?
Madison laughed to herself as she reread the message. Who would I tell? she typed. My sisters? My mom? You think I’m going to tell them I’m talking to some dude on a suicide website? How crazy do you think I am?
LOL, Brandon replied. Just making sure. What about your friends?
Friends? LOL, Madison wrote. Dude, I don’t have any friends. You’re my friend. Why so paranoid?
Don’t want anything screwing this up, Brandon wrote. What we’re going to do, it’s too important to mess up by being careless.
I promise, Madison told him. I haven’t told anyone. I’m not as dumb as you clearly think I am.
Don’t think you’re dumb.
Whatever, Madison wrote. I GTG. Class is in session.
Do you really think I’m just some dude on a suicide website? Brandon asked.
Madison glanced up at the blackboard, where Rhodes was blabbering on about Lewis and Clark.
Of course not, she started typing. I really like—
“Miss Mackenzie.” This was Rhodes, finished with Lewis and Clark and fixing a thousand-watt death stare in her direction. “Would you care to share what you’re texting with the class?”
Madison felt eyes turning to stare at her. Heard Lena Jane Poole giggle from three rows over, felt herself blushing. Felt an undercurrent of panic, too, as her mind flashed ahead to what would happen if Rhodes took her phone, if he read what she was typing, and to whom.
“No, sir,” she told the teacher. “Just inputting the date of the midterm into my calendar. I was listening, I swear.”
Rhodes glared at her. “You swear,” he said. “Well, since you were obviously listening, you’ll have no problem telling me the name of the member of the expedition who died first.”
Madison closed her eyes. Blew out a sigh. Of course she didn’t know the dude’s name. She wished she could run away to Brandon right now, find that Ferrari and that cliff and just be done with it.
“Miss Mackenzie?” Rhodes had his eyebrow arched, milking the moment, getting his money’s worth. Madison could tell from the smirks on the faces of the kids around her that everyone else was enjoying it, too. Lena Jane Poole had her iPhone raised, probably shooting video. Something to post online later, something for everyone to laugh at.
What else was new?
Rhodes waited. Madison didn’t answer. Just stared at her teacher as her teacher stared back, a standoff. Then someone whispered nearby.
“Floyd.” It was Paul, the goofy guy who sat next to her. “Charles Floyd.”
Madison hesitated. Paul had his head in his textbook, his whisper barely louder than a breath.
“Uh, Charles Floyd?” she said.
“Very good.” Rhodes took a couple steps closer. “And how did he die?”
Madison stifled the urge to look at Paul. Waited, strained her ears for Paul’s answer. “Appendicitis.”
“Appendicitis,” she repeated.
Rhodes nodded. “Very good,” he said. “Very good answers, Mr. Dayton.”
Paul’s head snapped up. He went red. “Pardon?”
“I’m not so deaf as to be unable to hear a whispered answer, Mr. Dayton,” Rhodes said. “It’s very kind of you to want to assist Miss Mackenzie, but she is going to have to learn to sink or swim on her own.” He turned back toward the blackboard. “For texting in class, Miss Mackenzie, I’m awarding you two days in detention. For helping her, Mr. Dayton . . .” Rhodes paused, gave it a dramatic flourish. “I award you the same. See you this afternoon.”
• • •
Ugh, Madison messaged Brandon. Sorry about the delay. History class. I just got a detention for texting in class.
Class was over. Rhodes had, mercifully, avoided picking on her for the rest of the period, but the damage was done. Detention, first off, and the embarrassment that came with looking like a fool in front of Lena Jane Poole and the rest of the class.
Not that it mattered.
I have to get out of this place, she wrote Brandon. Soon. I’m dying here, and not in the good way.
She pressed send and carried on down the hall, waiting for Brandon’s reply. Didn’t hear Paul coming up behind her until he was tapping her on the shoulder, saying her name.
“Hey,” he said, a sheepish expression on his face. “Sorry about what happened back there. I didn’t think Rhodes could hear me.”
“Never mind,” Madison said. “It is what it is. I was going to get a detention either way, I guess.”
“Yeah. Now at least you have company, right?”
“Right,” Madison said. “Exactly.”
If Paul could sense the sarcasm, he wasn’t letting on. “Who are you texting, anyway?” he said. “You always have your nose in that phone.”
Madison tried to project a Don’t bother me vibe. “Why do you care?” she asked him. “What’s it matter to you?”
“You’re just always so, I dunno, antisocial,” Paul said. “Like you never talk to anyone or even smile or make eye contact. But you’re always smiling when you’re on your phone.”
“I’m talking to my boyfriend,” Madison said. “All right? Not that it’s any of your business, but there you go.”
Paul’s smile faded a little. His cockiness dissipated. “Ah,” he said. “Okay. I see how it is.”
“Yeah,” Madison said. “That’s how it is.”
She left Paul standing in the hallway, eating her dust. Pulled out her phone again and saw that Brandon had answered.
So you really don’t think I’m just some dude on a website, right? he’d written.
Madison frowned. Boys were so needy. Still, it was kind of cute that he cared this much.
Of course not, she replied. You’re special to me. Thelma and Louise, remember?
The answer came fast. LOL. I’m Thelma.
I still haven’t seen the movie, Madison wrote. Realized she was smiling again, looked around to make sure Paul wasn’t watching. I reserve the right to choose until I do.
< 49 >
Mathers had a location for Tammy Gruber by the time Stevens and Windermere touched down in Louisville. But what he’d found wasn’t promising.
“Mom’s in Cincinnati,” he told Windermere. “But she hasn’t seen her son in more than fifteen years. Says he cut out on her shortly after they left Louisville, hasn’t shown his face since.”
“No phone calls?” Windermere said. “No letters?”
“Not even a postcard. Didn’t sound like old Tammy was too broken up about it. I got the feeling she was happy to be rid of her little boy. Said he was always a bit of a weird kid, kind of gave her the creeps.”
“Imagine what she’d think of him now,” Windermere said. She thanked Mathers and told him good-bye, ended the call before he could get all wishy-washy again, that Carla, we need to talk crap.
“Tammy Gruber’s in Cincinnati,” she told Stevens as they walked out of the terminal. “But she can’t point us to her boy.”
“So what do we do?” Stevens asked her.
Windermere scanned the parking lot, found the rental car. “I have some ideas,” she told him. “Toss me those keys, would you? I’m driving.”
• • •
They picked up Randall Gruber’s trail at a psychiatric hospital in southeast Louisville, a pleasant, five-story brick facility set amid a campus of rolling lawns and the odd copse of trees. Windermere parked the rental car in the visitors’ lot, and they rode the elevator to the residential ward, where a doctor named McCarthy met them at a security station in front of a pair of locked double doors.
“Call me Rosemary, please,” she said as she led them through the doors and into a cluttered office. “We try to keep things informal in this part of the hospital. Try to keep the whole situation as humanizing as possible.”
“Sure,” Stevens said. “I imagine the kids you’re dealing with here have it rough enough as it is.”
“Very true,” McCarthy agreed. “And if you’re here about Randall Gruber, you already know all about it.”
“So you remember Randall,” Windermere said. “That would have been, what, twenty, twenty-five years ago?”
“I remember,” McCarthy told her. “I was younger then, just starting out, and Randall . . . What happened in that trailer out there is one of the saddest situations I’ve ever come across, professionally or otherwise.”
She picked up a file folder from her desk, opened it, scanned the contents. Stevens and Windermere watched her.
“You treated Randall here because of what happened to his stepsister, correct?” Stevens said. “And because of what his stepfather—Earl Sanderson—had been doing before Sarah died. I assume that’s standard procedure in child abuse cases?”
“It is,” McCarthy replied, “though not to the extent that we treated Randall. This was something more than simple child abuse.”
“I don’t understand,” Windermere said. “How do you mean?”
McCarthy put down the file. Slid it across the table. Photocopies of drawings, an unsteady hand. A girl or a woman with hair the same color as the rope around her neck.
“I began treating Randall under the assumption that he’d played a bystander’s role in everything that went on,” McCarthy told them as they studied the drawings. “I assumed he’d been a victim of his stepfather, and nothing more. But that was before Randall told me about the hole in the wall.”
Stevens felt a bolt of electricity, his cop instincts perking up. “The hole in the wall,” he said. “Can you explain?”
“Randall watched her,” McCarthy told them. “From the day they moved into that trailer, five or six months before Sarah’s death, he watched her through the wall. He told me it was sometimes the only thing that kept him going, knowing that he could watch her, like his own private movie.”
“Did she know?” Stevens asked. “Was this some secret game of theirs?”
McCarthy shook her head. “Not until the end, Randall said. Not until the moment before she died. He said he tried to hold his breath, but he couldn’t, and she saw him as she was setting up the rope. She saw him, he said, but she did it anyway. That’s how he knew it was okay.”
Stevens and Windermere looked at each other again. “So he watched her,” Windermere said. “Just like Ashley Frey.”
Stevens nodded. “Only, Ashley Frey has a webcam.”
“Is there a connection here?” McCarthy asked, frowning. “You mentioned this pertained to a case you’re investigating. Is Randall involved in some way?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” Windermere said. “We’re dealing with a predator who finds depressed teenagers online and encourages them to hang themselves while she watches. So far, we count five victims, and the similarities are striking. Right down to the color of the rope.”
“You treated Randall Gruber,” Stevens told McCarthy. “We don’t want to ask you to make a leap that you can’t, but does this sound like something in Randall’s ballpark?”
McCarthy didn’t answer for a moment. She’d paled, Stevens thought, unless it was just a trick of the light. She exhaled heavily and sat forward.
“It’s in his ballpark, yes,” she said quietly. “To be perfectly honest, I’ve often wondered just when I would have to have this conversation. We couldn’t keep treating Randall after he turned eighteen. We just don’t have the resources, or the legal right. His mother took him away, and I think they moved out of town. But—”
“But you would have kept him here, if you could have,” Windermere said.
McCarthy nodded. “What happened in that trailer, it changed Randall,” she said. “He came to me troubled, and I wasn’t able to reverse it. His stepfather had reached him in a place where I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried.”
She looked down at the file folder. Flipped through the drawings. Stevens and Windermere waited, the doctor’s words hanging in the air.
“He told me he enjoyed it,” McCarthy continued, and her words still bore scars. “He hated his stepsister, thought her father gave her special treatment. He told me he made it his mission to push her to the edge. He told me it made him feel powerful.”
She shuddered. “He told me it felt like a game.”
< 50 >
“So Ashley Frey’s a he after all,” Windermere said as they drove away from the hospital. “Leave it to a man to come up with a scheme like this.”
In the passenger seat, Stevens shivered. “He watched her hang herself” he said. “He pushed his sister to do it.”
“A game,” Windermere said. She’d scanned Randall Gruber’s file in Rosemary McCarthy’s office. Figured she’d picked up a little bit on the kid. “He didn’t have many friends, apparently. Nobody to really relate to. Even his stepsister wanted nothing to do with him.”
“Alone in that trailer with his stepfather running rampant.” Stevens looked out the window. “Maybe it was his way of asserting himself. Being heard.”
“We’re sure hearing him now,” Windermere said. She signaled, turned onto the interstate on-ramp. Pressed down on the gas, the rental car’s engine straining under her heavy foot. “Let’s go talk to the stepfather, huh?”
• • •
Earl Sanderson lived across the river in New Albany, Indiana, a crummy brick apartment building in the shadow of the Sherman Minton, the big interstate bridge running over the Ohio River and back into Louisville.
They found his place pretty easily. But Earl wasn’t home. And the woman who answered his door wasn’t exactly bursting with clues.
“Went out,” she told them, scratching under her worn robe. “Dunno where, exactly. You try downstairs yet?”
Stevens and Windermere exchanged glances. There was a bar built into the first floor of the place, not the most reputable-looking establishment.
“If Earl’s not there, I don’t know what to tell you,” the woman continued. “My satellite surveillance camera’s kind of acting up lately.”
She was an older woman, mid-fifties, a couple fading bruises on her arms, a split lip. Wouldn’t look them in the eye, either of them.
“He’s not in any trouble, is he?”
“Not so far,” Windermere replied. “But maybe he should be.”
• • •
They checked out the bar, the Rusty Nail, a flat painted door and boarded-up windows on the outside, a pockmarked bar and a sticky floor and dim lighting on the inside, the pervasive odor of mildew, cigarettes, and stale beer. But no sign of Earl Sanderson.
“Just missed him,” the bartender told Stevens and Windermere. “He shoved off with old Joan about a half hour ago, sounded like they were aiming to party.”
“Old Joan,” Windermere said. “That lady in his apartment doesn’t mind?”
“Couldn’t tell you,” the bartender said. “Don’t think she knows about Earl and Joan, and I suspect Earl’d like to keep it that way.”
He reached under the bar, pulled out a bowl of mixed nuts that must have dated back to the Nixon administration.
“Listen, if it’s Earl you’re after, you’re just as well staying in one place,” he said. “Try and follow that man, you’ll be chasing him around all night. Hard to pin down, what I’m saying.”
“So where would you suggest we stay?” Windermere asked. “If we were aiming to pin him.”
“Tomorrow’s what, Wednesday? He usually comes around Wednesdays. Happy hour, three o’clock. Buck-fifty Budweisers, three-dollar highballs. He’ll be here.”
Windermere surveyed the joint, the scarred tabletops, the hunchbacked regulars. Figured the last thing she wanted was to spend another two or three hours scouring places like this.
“Three o’clock,” she said. “Guess we’ll see you tomorrow.”
< 51 >
It was dark when Stevens and Windermere pulled into the little town of Elizabeth, twenty miles down the Ohio River from Louisville and New Albany, on the Indiana side of the water. The place was quiet, sleepy, little more than a single main road and a couple ramshackle storefronts, a decrepit mechanic’s shop and a general store with greasy windows and a hand-painted sign.
Windermere peered out the windshield, idled the rental slow down main street. Took one lap of the town, then another.
“Place is a ghost town,” she muttered. “Or a horror-movie set.”
She sent Stevens into the general store for directions, watched ragged trees claw at the wind in the shadows as she waited. Stevens came out a couple minutes later, scratching his head. “About a mile out of town,” he said, sliding into the seat. “Back toward the river. The guy in there said it’s been abandoned for years.”
“Even better,” Windermere said, shifting into drive, her free hand checking her shoulder holster for the familiar weight of her service pistol. Might have been silly, but the place was kind of spooky. And the thought of Randall Gruber out here, somewhere, gave her the creeps.
