Dreams in the Key of Blue (30 page)

Jacobs laughed.

“Tell Herb I’ll be another hour.”

She nodded. “My case is Dorman,” Jacobs said. “How does Squires connect to him?”

“What Gretchen Nash observed suggests that Squires is Lily Dorman.”

“I read that psychologist’s report before I sent it to you. She’s probably wished Dorman dead since she was a kid. Can’t say I blame her, but why is she taking out half the population?”

“Squires was in my seminar at the college. She talked about a killer hybrid, a woman who doesn’t fit any of the stereotypes. That idea seemed important to her. The psychiatrist who treated Dorman at Maine Central is convinced that she suffers from multiple personality disorder.”

Jacobs shoved her hands deep into her jacket pockets. “I read about a case like that. Can’t say I buy into that shit.”

“There’s a personal connection here, too,” I added. “I knew Katrina Martin years ago.”

“Was she sick then?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. She did a lot of drugs, so she always seemed strange.”

Jacobs stood beside her cruiser. “Most men won’t believe that a woman did all this killing,” she said.

“Some women, too,” I added, thinking about Karen Jasper.

Jacobs shook her head. “Anyone is capable of anything.”

I PARKED IN AN ALLEY ADJACENT TO THE DANFORTH STREET
apartment building. I estimated that I had a twenty-minute lead on the police, who would arrive prepared to arrest Amanda Squires.

I did not expect her to be at home.

The street door popped open without a problem. I listened at Squires’s door, heard nothing, and went to work. The lock gave, and I stepped into a twenty-by-forty-foot room. There was an upright piano against the wall to my left, an archway to my right, a curtained archway directly across the room. An easel and canvas stood in the northwest corner of the room. A rolltop desk squatted immediately to my left, against the front wall.

“Someone just like me,” I muttered, gazing at the desk’s cluttered surface—a stack of unopened mail, grocery store coupons, an aspirin bottle, a dozen paperbacks, and a small basket filled with checks.

The checks, issued twice a month, were drawn on Maine Marine Bank and Trust, payable to Amanda Squires for five thousand dollars, and signed by Paul Crandall.

“She never cashed them,” I said.

I opened a file folder that contained heavily marked
highway and topographical maps of the area immediately west of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Somewhere in that maze of dirt roads and rutted logging trails, Stanley Markham had plunged a knife into Darcy Smith’s chest. It was the same area where Lily Dorman had caught up with Markham and put a bullet in his head.

Everything comes full circle.

I pictured Gretchen Nash’s caricature of Crandall, the short, rotund man she said was all tics and fidgets. Perhaps a middle-of-the-night visit to Stu Gilman was in order.

The only opened piece of mail was a letter to Amanda Squires bearing the ink-stamped return address of a California prison. I unfolded the single sheet of lined paper and read the childlike scrawl.

Squires had fixated on the Clanton case, researched the story, recited details in class. She also had a personal relationship with the fifty-one-year-old multiple killer who admitted fabricating her victimization story to win the sympathy of the court, and an earlier parole-eligibility date.

“To quote a friend of mine, ‘Sydny Clanton was dreaming the blue dream that never ends.’”

Was her friend inside her head?

As I pocketed the letter and several uncashed checks, a yellowed newspaper clipping pushpinned to a bulletin board caught my attention. The article from an Idaho newspaper was an early account of the murders of “a married couple in their ranch home near Moscow.” The date was May 1, 1967.

On the day that Sydny Clanton savaged her parents, Lily Dorman was born.

I moved away from the desk. The apartment had the distinctive aroma of a pine forest, but I could not determine where the scent originated.

I walked through the archway to my right and examined a painting on Squires’s easel. Oil pastels swept in broad strokes across the coarse paper. She had smudged and smeared the colors into a shimmering blue sphere streaked with red. It was so vivid that I imagined it pulsating, like a dream screen, the throbbing orb that conceals horrific reveries of night.

The sphere is a pulsating, living wall, a defense against horror.

“It’s a talisman,” I muttered.

It has magical properties—the power to ward off evil, the skill to elude whatever bubbles beneath consciousness.

I wondered about Lily Dorman’s dreams. She would not want to know what shapes slithered and screamed beyond the grasp of consciousness. Keeping her beast locked
in a closet carried a serious liability: she would receive no warning about what surged into the light of her days.

What most frightens you is what goes on inside your head.

I stared at her creation, studied its daubed blues, blended hues of sky and sea and cold blue eyes.

The odor of pine was strong again—through the curtained archway, I thought.

“She had an aura of fresh-cut pine. The screen turned blue. It made me sad, and I don’t like to feel sad. So I got mad.”

Sydny Clanton spoke those words. Clanton was not an “exception.” Neither was Aileen Wuornos. Lily Dorman was a living reminder that the rules, based on our cultural myths of female innocence, do not always apply.

I stepped through the curtain and walked into a dimly lit room that contained ten aquarium tanks. Most wore pink heat lamps fitted to their tops; the remainder were covered with hardware cloth. All of them contained snakes.

Approach-avoidance, I thought. She was compelled to tease herself with what she most feared. The paired association seemed obvious. As a child, Lily Dorman stood in the swamp and conversed with her snakes, predators that she studied and understood. From where she stood on the dike, she heard her father’s pickup drive into the yard, then heard his gun explode.

Harper Dorman killed the dog, then raped his daughter.

I pressed my fingers against the glass that prevented a copperhead from injecting me with its lethal venom.

You surround yourself with your horror, but keep it behind a curtain, a screen that offers you the illusion of control. You do not fear what you have held in your hand. You are at liberty to tease yourself with free-floating thoughts,
sounds, tactile sensations, because you became what you feared.

The display was a herpetologist’s dream and anyone else’s nightmare. I felt certain that my rattling visitor had been in residence here until Lily Dorman deposited it in my study.

Squires sat in my house. Someone else drove the Volvo.

I wanted to spend more time in the apartment, to prowl through bookcases and drawers and file cabinets, to develop a feel for this person. Three quick blasts from the door’s buzzer changed my mind.

Jacobs’s people would not announce themselves, I thought, as I stepped into the hall and walked to the top of the stairwell overlooking the vestibule. A tall man with thinning hair, dressed casually in khakis and a blue jacket, pulled open the door and strode toward the stairs.

I retreated to the shadows at the rear of the building and watched as he approached Squires’s door, keys in hand. “She isn’t home,” I said.

He turned and gazed disapprovingly in my direction. “Who are you?” he demanded.

Before I could answer, he slipped his key into the lock and said, “I’m calling the police.”

I walked slowly toward the man. “No need,” I said. “They’re on the way.”

He glared at me. “What’s going on here?”

My mystery guest was taller than I, slender, in his forties. His gold Rolex told me that he was not a homeless person seeking shelter for the night.

“Where is Lily Dorman?” I asked.

“You’re trespassing,” he said.

I continued to move toward him. “The police are looking for her.”

For a man his size, he was quick. He yanked his keys from the lock, clocked me with his forearm, and bolted to
the stairs. I hauled myself off the floor and ran after him. As I reached the sidewalk, he climbed into a car and pulled away from the curb.

I figured that his identity would not be difficult to determine. The personalized license plate on his black Mercedes read
“NORT.”

“You’ve got one coming,” I muttered, rubbing the side of my head and walking to my Jeep.

I drove down Danforth Street and passed three city police cruisers on their way to Squires’s building.

STUART GILMAN LIVED IN A CUL-DE-SAC A HUNDRED
yards from the Atlantic Ocean. I pulled into his driveway, powered down my window, and listened to the sea.

The few houses nestled among pines and low scrub growth were dark and silent. Lights glared from every window of Gilman’s modern Cape Cod. I glanced at the dashboard clock: three-thirty
A.M.,
long past my bedtime and long past Gilman’s.

I walked to the small terrace in front of the house and peered through a window. Gilman sprawled over a hassock, with a yellow rubber duck in one hand and a nearly empty wine bottle in the other.
USA Today
lay open on the floor in front of him. His suit jacket was crumpled in a heap behind him.

The door was not locked, so I stepped inside and walked to the living room, which boasted a brick fireplace, puffed white and tan decor, polished hardwood floors with a plush, off-white carpet, copies of
Money, Business Week,
and
The Wall Street Journal.
The house and its transient library were about dollars.

Gilman looked up, his watery eyes streaked with red, his face baggy and sodden, his mouth in twitch mode. “You’ve got more hair on the bottom of your head than I
have on the top,” he said, his speech slurred. “What are you doing here?”

“I want to rent an apartment.”

He nodded his head, as if apartment hunting in his living room in the middle of the night made perfectly good sense. “My wife took the kids. She pulled one of ‘em right out of the tub.”

Gilman held up the yellow bath toy. “She took them to a hotel.”

“She must be angry.”

He mumbled something that I could not understand, then thumped his bottle on the
USA Today
weather map. “I’ve been clipping these out of the papers. I intend to prove that these weather maps are more accurate than what those nitwits in Augusta and Boston predict. We have volatile weather here.”

“Stu, how long have you been acting the part of Paul Crandall?” I asked.

At first, Gilman did not react. He continued to stare at his newspaper. Then his tics and twitches disappeared, and the color drained from his face. He dropped the rubber duck, released his grip on the wine bottle, and pushed himself from the hassock to a kneeling position. “What the fuck do you want?”

Gilman’s voice had the same edge that I had heard when he caught me in the college’s roomful of computers. I was determined not to be blindsided a second time in one night. I was also tired, hungry, and pissed off.

“For starters, an answer to my question,” I said as I grabbed a magazine and rolled it into a tight tube.

“Get a cop and get a warrant,” he said.

I gripped my copy of
Business Week
with my right hand and slapped it against my left. “You ready to post bail?”

“What the hell are you talking about? I haven’t done anything.”

“Creating a false identity, Paul Crandall, and conducting business under that name, is illegal. That’s just for openers.”

Gilman made the move I anticipated. He grasped the hassock, pulled himself to a halfstanding position, and lurched toward me with the grace, coordination, and dexterity of Frankenstein’s monster.

I stabbed forward with the rolled magazine and caught him on the bridge of his nose. He fell sideways onto the couch, covering his face with his hands. Blood seeped between his fingers.

“You broke my fuckin’ nose,” he howled as his blood stained the white sofa. “Shit. Clea’s gonna kill me.”

Still holding one hand over his nose, he pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at the maroon marks on the fabric.

“No more stunts, Stu. You’re too drunk to damage anyone but yourself.”