In the Shadow of Angels (17 page)

“We’d better get going,” Brent said.

Beth gave Devin a soft kiss before letting him go. “Will the car be okay here alone?” She asked.

Since they hadn’t planned on the car being here before Jezebel’s body was, this was something none of them gave any consideration to. Would it be okay here? Probably. It wasn’t going to drive itself away, but what if someone else happened to see it? They hadn’t seen a single car as they drove out here, but what if someone happened to miss a turn and found the car here? They might call the police and report it. If that happened, the police, or even a tow truck, might show up while they were staging the accident. Or, possibly worse, before they did. Even if they didn’t have a phone, they might write down the plate number and call it in after they got back to town. They would have no way of knowing if anyone saw it.

Devin sighed deeply. He was going to have to stay here. He couldn’t ask Beth to do it and there was no chance she would have after that drive anyway. It didn’t seem fair to leave Brent, whose own involvement in everything tonight was a debt that Devin would be repaying for the rest of his life. He would have to do it himself. If anyone happened to show up at the end of the road, he would just tell him or her that the car broke down and he already called someone. The likelihood of that seemed infinitesimally small, but they needed to be sure.

“I need to stay with the car.”

If he expected any sort of resistance, he would have been disappointed. Both Beth and Brent had been running similar scenarios in their own minds and each decided that someone needed to stay behind. Each also decided that it should be Devin. He remained silent for a moment awaiting the non-existent response.

“Please just be quick,” he said, breaking the uneasy silence. “I know that we’re all still worried about Jimmy, but please come right back.”

Brent nodded in response as he opened the door of the BMW for Beth. He closed her door and made his way back to the driver’s side.

“We’ll be right back,” he said, before getting in and closing the door.

Devin leaned against the side of the Fiero and watched as the BMW’s taillights disappeared down Turner Road. Once the red dot of the lights disappeared completely, he suddenly felt very alone.

The moon was still high in the sky, casting plenty of light over the landing where the Fiero was sitting. He walked to the edge and looked down to the rock outcropping which the car would be crashing into in only a few minutes. It was just visible at the edge of the forest below. The drop leading to it was every bit as steep as he remembered. Their plan should work just fine.

Gasoline!
He thought, suddenly. He should have told Brent to get gasoline while he was getting Jez’s body. They would need something to start the fire. They talked about using gasoline to start the fire on the car’s engine when they put the plan together, but what if he forgot?

Devin shook his head and clenched his fists against the doubt. Brent would remember the gasoline. He just watched the guy stage a body in the most convincing autoerotic asphyxiation pose he had ever seen. Although it was also the only one he had ever seen, so the bar wasn’t set incredibly high. He must have pieced that plan together on a ten minute car ride. The guy who put that together wasn’t going to forget such a major detail.

He walked back to the Fiero and leaned against it, watching the road for approaching headlights. He would have to ask Brent how he came up with that idea for Digby’s body later. Or not. He had a strong feeling that once they sent the Fiero over the edge of this landing, none of them would want to talk about what happened tonight again.

Right now, he just needed to stay out of his own head. His every thought started with a missed detail and ended with a prison term. And he had only been alone here for a few minutes. He wondered how Dr. Stephens was handling the solitude. He had been alone with his thoughts for considerably longer. Devin shook his head against that thought, too.

Brent was doing his best not to look at Beth as they started the drive back to the house. She was still trembling. He could see it in her hands. The drive was obviously worse for her than it had been for them. She was staring blankly out the side window into the darkness of the forest, her mind elsewhere. He didn’t want to call attention to her shaking hands and his attempt at small talk on the way to The Place was a bust, so he was also trying not to speak.

When they reached the transition between the dirt road and the pavement, the car jumped a bit. This was enough to snap Beth from whatever place her mind was. Her emergence into the present was a bit unsettling to Brent though, as it took the form of laughter. As a non sequitur, in a situation as deeply serious as they were, the laughter was positively chilling.

“Was that it?” She asked as she continued laughing.

Brent was caught off guard by the question but didn’t speak. He wasn’t sure what she was asking, or if she was even talking to him, really.

“That piece of shit car nearly ripped my arms off when I hit that earlier. You could hardly even feel it.”

At least he knew what she was talking about. That was reassuring. He had been beginning to wonder if she might have snapped. Was that what she was thinking about the whole time they were driving?

As if in response to the unasked question, Beth spoke again. “I’m not driving Devin’s car back over here. Just know that.”

“I know,” Brent replied. “That’s not what you’ve been worrying about, is it?”

“Worrying?”

Her question seemed so genuine that he thought it would be all right to press on a little.

“You’ve been staring into nothing with your hands shaking since we left. I know the situation is tense. It is on all of us, but it seems like your mind is somewhere else.”

“Oh. I just…” she began but trailed off, shifting uncomfortably in the passenger seat.

When it became clear that she wasn’t going to continue, Brent spoke again. “I’m sorry that we made you drive the car, but it made sense.”

“No, it’s not that,” she said, looking away from him and back out the window. “I’m just trying to figure out if I’ll be able to live with myself.”

“All you did is drive the car, Beth. You didn’t kill her.”

Beth laughed again and again the unwarranted nature of it made Brent shiver.

“I tried to kill her … I think … But that’s not what I’m talking about either.”

That was when Brent realized what was bothering her. He knew he would need to get it out in the open eventually and the opening here seemed as a good an opportunity as he was likely to get.

“Devin didn’t see the pictures,” he offered, thinking she would immediately know what he was talking about. He was obviously wrong.

“What pictures? The pictures of him and Jezebel?”

Brent sighed deeply. There was no turning back now.

“The pictures of you and Dr. Stephens.”

Beth turned to Brent incredulously, her eyes wide. “There were pictures?!”

She turned away from Brent and started crying. Once she started, she just couldn’t stop. Brent regretted having said it. In hindsight, his timing was quite poor. The situation was already very tense and piling onto that had clearly been a mistake. After a couple of minutes, Beth began gasping between sobs. She leaned forward with her forearms on the dashboard and her head resting on them. She couldn’t stop crying.

Brent was no expert on women, as evidenced by the creepy, pedo-van which he drove, but even he knew that he couldn’t take Beth back to see Dr. Stephens in her emotional state. While he couldn’t be sure what would happen if she were to see him now, he was certain that it wouldn’t be good.

Brent slowed down and eased the BMW onto the shoulder of the road. He knew that trying to comfort a woman himself was a bit like trying to clean the fine China with a sandblaster, but right now he didn’t have any other options. Dr. Stephens was sitting with a body a couple of miles ahead of him and Devin was in the middle of nowhere waiting to dispose of it a couple of miles the other way. There wasn’t time to involve someone competent.

“Beth?” He questioned softly, reaching his hand out and resting it on her shoulder. “It’s okay, Beth.”

The gesture seemed very stiff and robotic, even to Brent, but Beth didn’t seem to notice. She turned from the dashboard and threw her arms around him. With her head on his shoulder, she continued crying.

Brent had known Beth for many years and in that time he never saw her cry - not like this. She was, unquestionably, the strongest woman he knew, both in terms of physical and mental strength. This type of a breakdown was not something he would have expected from her and it was breaking his heart.

She didn’t like him very much, he knew that, but she was clinging to him as if he was her security blanket; latching onto anything familiar. Whatever it was that was going on here, it was much more than her just banging the doctor to get back at Devin. Or, he reasoned, perhaps it wasn’t but she regretted it more than she anticipated. Whatever the reason, it was eating her up inside.

Brent always wondered how a woman could get out of a speeding ticket with nothing more than a couple of tears. In this moment, he understood completely. He didn’t have anything to do with her pain, but by virtue of being the messenger, he felt somehow responsible. If he could have taken the words back, he would have. He would have done anything to take her pain away.

After a time, Beth started mumbling between gulps for air. Her words were very soft and he couldn’t make them out at first, but much like the crying, once she got going, there was no stopping her.

“…And then he said that it wasn’t love, it was just sex. He said that Jezebel was nothing to Devin. He said that I couldn’t believe him though.”

She leaned back from Brent, whatever thought she was currently having taking her from defeated tears to angry vengeance. She clenched her right fist tightly and started pounding on his chest, “Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!” She yelled as she pummeled him.

“He said that I needed to go see where they had sex. He said that if I saw it I would understand. He said he would take me there at night, just like when Devin met Jezebel … Stupid!”

Brent could see where this was going. He wanted desperately to stop her from saying it. “Beth, you don’t have to…”

“And when we got there, he said we should go into the room where Devin fucked her. He said I would understand then.”

Beth turned away from Brent and buried her head in her hands.

“He told me to look out the window. To look at the empty pool with all the graffiti painted on it. He said, ‘
does that look like love to you?
’. I started crying. He said that I still didn’t understand. He said that I needed to understand, that he could help me understand…”

“Beth,” Brent said. “You can stop. I get it.”

“And he walked up behind me,” Beth continued, ignoring him, “and pushed me forward. I didn’t stop him. I knew what he was doing, but I didn’t stop him.”

Beth stopped crying and the silence in the car was deafening. Her face was an eerie kind of calm. Somehow, just telling him what happened soothed her. Brent, on the other hand, was fighting to keep from showing the anger he was suddenly feeling.

“I cried the whole time,” she said, “I cried the whole time but he just kept going.”

“Beth,” Brent said, trying his best to sound calm. “He raped you. Why didn’t you go to the police?”

Beth laughed that same hauntingly inappropriate laugh. “Because he was right, Brent. I didn’t want to fuck him, at least I don’t think I did and I cried the whole time … But when he was done, I wasn’t mad at Devin anymore.”

Jesus Christ
, Brent thought to himself,
he made her think it was part of her therapy.
He could hardly believe it worked. Beth was the smartest woman he knew but she appeared to have fallen for it. He wondered how many other women the guy fucked as part of their ‘therapy’.

“I didn’t know there were pictures though.”

Brent reached into his pocket and pulled out the memory card. He held it up to show her. Before he had a chance to react, and even if he had time to react, he probably wouldn’t have, Beth grabbed the card from his hand. She opened the door of the car and ran to the front where the headlights were shining on the ground. She dropped the card on the ground, found a fist-sized rock, picked it up and started smashing the card. She continued doing so even after she mangled it beyond recognition.

Beth was still kneeling when Brent walked up behind her. Her tears were gone, but she was still gasping for breath.

“Do you feel better?” Brent asked.

“No,” she replied flatly. “Not at all.”

Brent sat down on the ground beside her. He put his arm over her shoulder and around her neck. It seemed slightly less robotic this time.

“I think the worst part is that I kept going to see him.”

“You kept going?”

“Well, I couldn’t tell Devin what happened. I quit going to see him alone, but we still had the couple’s sessions.”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, there’s going to be proof that he is sleeping with his patients after tonight. I left a picture of him with one of his patients on the TV in the hotel room.”

“In the room with that investigator?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“I don’t think you want to know. At least not right now. Maybe I’ll explain it all to you once this is all over.”

Beth stood up. That last line reminded her what they were supposed to be doing. She dusted herself off the best she could in the light of the BMW’s headlights.

“We’d better get going,” she said. “I don’t want to leave Devin out there alone any longer than we need to.”

Brent stood up without speaking and started walking back toward the driver’s side of the car. Beth reached the car first and noticed the clamshell holders which housed the rest of the memory cards. They were between her feet for the entire ride, but she hadn’t noticed much of anything before. She picked one of them up and flipped it open.

“What are these?” she asked.

Brent wasn’t sure if he should answer her. On the one hand, he was glad that she saw them. He forgot about them and would have left them in the car when they got back to the house. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure what Devin’s plan for them was. He decided that lying to her would be easier than trying to answer a question to which he didn’t know the answer.

“I guess they are Dr. Stephens’ files.”

“I ought to just throw them out in the woods right here.” Beth said. “It would serve the bastard right.”

“Yeah, but we don’t want to make him mad. We can’t have him turn on us right now.”

As Brent spoke the last line, a realization swept over him. Dr. Stephens was completely off the hook now. He was having sex with Jezebel, among other patients, and trading that sex for drugs, but the only people who knew about that, or could prove it at any rate, were both dead now. If he decided to turn on them, he would get away clean. Jezebel’s body was in Devin’s car; he and Devin were the ones who moved the body; Jimmy was the one who killed Digby … There was really nothing to keep him from turning them all in. It was a very unsettling thought.

The rest of the drive to the house passed in silence.

When they arrived at the house, the exterior lights were still on. Brent turned the headlights off when they got close enough to the house to be seen. Beth found that odd, but chose not to mention it. He stopped the car well short of the garage.

“When we get inside, why don’t you just go up and check on Jimmy?”

“All right,” Beth replied, wanting to minimize the time she had to spend around Dr. Stephens anyway.

As she opened the door to get out of the car, Brent reached down and picked up the files that she asked him about earlier.

“I thought those were Dr. Stephens’ files,” she said as she saw him taking them out of the car.

“The more insurance we have the better,” he lied. “Hold up for just a minute.”

Brent took the files to the side of the house and found a likely place to stash them next to a rosebush. He hid them quickly and rejoined Beth. Together, they walked to the front door.

“You just check up on Jimmy and I’ll get everything ready to get Jezebel out of here, okay?”

Beth nodded.

Brent opened the door and they stepped inside. Dr. Stephens was sitting on the sofa in front of them. The door opening had startled him a bit, but he was trying not to show it.

“It seems like you’ve been gone forever,” he said.

“We decided to just take her car to the end of the road instead of stopping here first,” Brent replied. “It seemed like it would be a good idea to not have her tire tracks all over the driveway in case this all goes bad.”

Dr. Stephens nodded as he watched Beth walking toward the stairs in the corner of the room.

“So,” he said, “it’s almost over now.”

“It looks like it,” Brent responded. “Just a few more minutes and we can get on to trying to forget this whole mess.”