Skin Deep (8 page)

The mail consisted of bills, a clothing catalogue, a copy of
Entertainment Weekly,
flyers,
Psychology Today, Newsweek,
and a UPS envelope with a return address on the label that said the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology. The envelope was open, and inside was a letter congratulating Terry Farina for having received a five-thousand-dollar fellowship.

His phone rang. It was Wu. “Negative. No stocking packaging.”

Steve thanked him and clicked off. Maybe the killer had brought the stockings with him and left with the packaging. So, despite the explosive violence, he was cautious not to leave any trace of himself, then set up the autoerotica to look like an accident.

As Steve stood in the kitchen and processed that, he looked down at his PDA. As if on some weird autopilot, his finger pressed the button listing recent outgoing calls. Wu's number was on top, then Dana's. Then several others he had made over the last few days. He scrolled back to Sunday. Then Saturday the second.

For a moment he stared at a number that did not look familiar. A number he had called at 5:53
P.M.
Without a thought, he pressed the recall button. Like a half-glimpsed premonition, from across the room Terry Farina's telephone rang.

The phone was still ringing in his head as he drove to Carleton.

And slowly memory began to condense out of the fog. Terry Farina's number was on his scroll of outgoing calls because he had telephoned about her sunglasses.

Yes.
He had called to tell her that she had left them in the pub. Conor Larkins on Huntington Avenue Across from the NU quad. It's where he had bumped into her.

That was it.
And it came back to him with a shudder.

Last Saturday afternoon. He was off-duty and did his grades at home. Then he drove to campus to drop them off. Because it was the weekend, the night school office was closed, so he went to the grade sheet drop-box in the open lobby. It was late afternoon and he was hungry so he went to the pub for a sandwich. To his surprise, Terry was in a quiet booth in the corner doing a final on her laptop. She was just finishing but invited him to join her. She had already eaten and he didn't want to eat alone, so he ordered a draft of Sam Adams and she had a glass of white wine. They chatted for a while until she had to leave to run off her exam in the library then slip it under her instructor's door. Then she would head home because she was going out of town the next morning. They said goodbye, and he stayed behind and ordered a sandwich. Before he left, he noticed that she had forgotten her sunglasses. Because he didn't have her home number, he called Information, then gave her a call to say he could drop them off.

As he turned off Route 2 into Carleton, all he could remember beyond that was parking across the street from Terry's apartment building. Until Reardon's call the next morning, everything else was a dead blank.

The good news was that there was no listing of his call in the subpoenaed records from her carrier. The only way the call was untraceable to his PDA phone was if he had first dialed *67 to block caller ID. The bad news was that he had.

And how do you explain that, pal?

The only thing that made sense was the old childhood guilt thing—the abnormal craving to eliminate any sign that he may have done something wrong even if he hadn't. Out of an ancient impulse to eradicate possible bad-boy intentions, he had deleted the connection.

Okay, so what were your bad-boy intentions?

He pushed down the voice. He had also lost all recall.

But a fifteen-hour hole?

Maybe it was the beer. That and the medication the doctor had put him on. Sure! For a few years that had worked well, leveling off the symptoms to the point that he could take a milligram or two of Ativan as needed. But since his breakup with Dana, some of the anxieties and compulsive thoughts had returned. And with them, symptoms like the guilt clean-up rituals.

At least he was no longer a slave to the compulsive hand-washing and seven showers a day. Nor did he still go through his day plagued by the closed-looped tape playing in his head as when he was younger: “
Step on a crack, break your mother's back.”

But he wasn't completely cured.

There was *67.

 

By the time he arrived at the house he felt better, although he made a mental note to check the online pharmacy sites when he got home.

It was a little after eight when he pulled behind Dana's car, which sat in the middle of the garage, overlapping both slots. They had lived separately for six months, but whenever he stopped by he felt like an intruder on his own turf, his marriage house—the neat, white, central entrance colonial with green shutters and a hostas-lined redbrick front walk and detached garage—the place on which he still made monthly payments.

He had come this time to pick up a container of his summer clothes from the cellar as well as a few items for his apartment.

Dana was grading student papers at the kitchen island when he arrived. She had expected him and said a cool hello then went back to her papers. As he rummaged through the stuff they had collected over the years, his mind flooded with memories from when they were a young pretty couple making young pretty plans. But the sadness was crossed with eddies of resentment.

He loaded his car, making three trips up the stairs and across the kitchen to the outside, avoiding any exchanges or eye contact while she sat there with her papers, fortified in her determination to live the rest of her life without him. Once she looked up and flashed him a smile, but instead of feeling gratified it made him all the more irritated. When he returned on his last run, she removed her glasses and slid a glass of sparkling water toward him. “Suddenly we're cordial,” he said, tasting the sourness of his words.

“Just trying to be nice.”

He picked up the glass and took a sip. He knew every nuance of Dana's emotional makeup. Something in her expression said there was another agenda.

“The news is full of the Farina murder. How's the investigation going?”

He could tell that she had little genuine interest in the case. “Nothing solid yet.”

“The paper says she was taking night courses at Northeastern.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did you know her?”

“Did I know her?” A worm slithered inside his chest.

“From your class.”

“She was taking courses in psychology, not criminal justice.”

“Such a shame. They said she was going to go to grad school in the fall.”

“Yeah.”

“Not that it makes any difference, but she was pretty.”

“She was also a stripper.” He mentioned that as if it explained something.

“A stripper?”

“I'm sure it'll be all over the media soon.”

“I thought she was a fitness trainer.”

“She stripped on the side,” he said. “According to her family she wasn't your average pole dancer. She was raised in a wealthy suburb of Chicago and went to private schools for girls then NYU. It's where she started stripping.”

“Is that right?”

In spite of the subject matter, he felt some relief that he had caught her interest, that he could still share something with her. “It was fast, easy money. Later she moved to Boston, and because she was in good shape she worked at health clubs. When she decided to go back to school she started stripping again to pay her way.”

Dana nodded. “Sounds like she was reinventing herself.”

“Maybe so.” He guzzled down his drink. “I've got to go.” He moved to the door.

She got up and came over to him. “I need a favor.”

“Sure.”

“The cosmetic surgeon's office called to say there was a last-minute cancellation. He can see me tomorrow morning.”

“What for?”

“It's only a consultation. He's Lanie Walker's surgeon, and he's quite famous.”

“You're really getting serious about this.”

“Yeah, I am. I'm just wondering if you'd come with me. Are you free?”

Steve's heart leapt up. He would have expected Lanie to accompany her. “What time?”

“Seven. He's squeezing me in before he goes into surgery.”

“The guy starts early.”

“I guess he's going on vacation in a few weeks and is making extra time.”

“And, no doubt, some traveling cash. Where's his office?”

“Route Nine, Chestnut Hill.”

“That'll work because I've got a unit meeting at nine.”

“I wouldn't ask, but Lanie's out of town.”

Steve felt his heart slump. “Oh. So you want me because you need a ride, not moral support.”

“Both.”

He didn't believe her. “I'll be by at six thirty.”

She could hear the flatness in his voice, but she disregarded it. “I appreciate that.”

He opened the door. “Is that what you're doing—reinventing yourself?”

“I'm only going to inquire about a lid lift, maybe a nose job.”

“Uh-huh, then why aren't you wearing your wedding ring?”

She glanced at her hand. “I took it off to take a shower.”

“Since when?”

“I always take my rings off when I shower.”

He nodded and he left, trying to recall if that was true.

“She was reinventing herself.”

Dana's words hummed across his brain like a plucked wire. The message was loud and clear, and it had little to do with younger women getting the hot sales jobs. That was the cover story. Lanie Fucking Walker who was this side of surgical addiction had planted the idea that maybe it was time to turn over the proverbial new leaf: get a job that paid. Get away from kids who reminded you of the family you don't have. And while you're at it, get a new face.

She had hammered Dana with the makeover mentality that was spreading like the Asian flu. Nobody wanted to age naturally. Nobody liked being themselves anymore. Everybody wanted the quick fix:
Losing your hair? Get plugs. Look like a dork in glasses? Call a laser clinic. Eyelids a tad thick? Nose too Greek? Crows walking all over your face? See a plastic guy.

But that was Steve's cover story. And he knew it. Dana's makeover went beyond her face. She was preparing herself a new life. And he was old skin.

It wasn't because of Sylvia Nevins. It was the old commitment thing. Dana wanted kids and he wasn't sure. It wasn't that he didn't like kids. Far from it. He feared fatherhood. And it wasn't because fatherhood meant a loss of freedom, not being able to go out with his buddies or on dream vacations. Nor was it the financial constraints. Nor did he fear losing his identity—no longer being part of a couple, just SteveandDana. On the contrary, whenever they visited Dana's sister, he saw how much life there was—people cooking, kids running around, the house a noisy mess. The place was alive, humming with people interacting, connecting to one another—and making him feel guilty that his own life was so boringly narcissistic.

He knew what lay beneath the trepidation—a realization that had come to him during his adolescence, something he had hoped to outgrow. But he couldn't, because he was convinced that he could never dispel the fear that he'd turn out like his parents—people so self-absorbed, so pathologically malcontent that they were incapable of raising him without passing on their own damage. He had met Dana in college and loved her looks from the moment he clapped eyes on her. They began dating immediately, but it took him five years before he could commit to marriage. Then he woke up one morning a married man, thinking that it wasn't so bad. But he dreaded the next expectation.

And when Dana began to press for children, he froze. In theory he wanted kids, but he never felt that he possessed the ability to secure a useful place in a child's life, that he could make an irrevocable commitment to a son or daughter. That he could be a good father.

He knew it was unhealthy, but he had never been able to share those fears with Dana. He should have, but he simply could not get himself to open up, even when she had laid down the ultimatum last Thanksgiving. Instead of spewing out the vomit from his soul, he continued to clamp down. Then he became reckless with booze, and at that Christmas party he took up with Sylvia Nevins. Dana was right: part of the reason for the affair was getting back at her. Also a shabby way of deflecting the commitment she sought.

Now it was too late. Dana's discovery was the deserved shot in the foot. And tonight he sat alone in this hovel, his belly hot with acid and a cabinet full of meds.

But at the moment he had other problems that lay balled-up under all the layers like in “The Princess and the Pea.”

In a box of receipts he had found one from Conor Larkins. June second, the time 5:59. Stapled to the Visa receipt was their order: one grilled chicken sandwich, one glass of Chardonnay, one beer, and two Chivas Regal Scotches. He did not remember having the Chivas. But that was his brand, the way Sam Adams was his beer and Veuve Clicquot was their champagne when he and Dana celebrated. But he did not recall ordering or downing them. Given the time of payment, he must have had those after Terry had left because the time recorded for his call to her was 5:53. Six minutes later he paid the check. Beyond that, he remembered nothing. Not until Reardon's call roused him out of an Ativan stupor.

On his laptop he found half a dozen pharmaceutical Web sites that said the same thing:

What kicked his heart into turbo was that the emergency vial of Ativan which he kept in his glove compartment just in case his anxiety level spiked was down to two 1 mg. tabs.
Jesus!
He had taken them on top of a beer and two Regals. He had no recall of that either. Which meant that sometime during the late afternoon with Terry he had overdosed.

But why?

He had no reason to be anxious. Terry was a casual acquaintance, not someone on whom he had serious designs. It was only casual chitchat over drinks. Unless, while he drove to her place with the sunglasses, his attraction to her had lit hairline roots into that black battery of guilt. And maybe to muffle the static he popped the tabs then blanked out.

“You can walk, you can talk, but you can't think.”

His doctor's caveat echoed across his brain.
Alcohol and Ativan is a combo looking for trouble. Your cognitive functions go haywire, and memory goes to fog.

Suddenly that pea was a damn golf ball.

What if he had headed over there with other intentions, Sylvia Nevins intentions, using the sunglasses as an invite?

No! Don't go there.

If his suspicions were correct, his visit to her place would technically make him a witness in the investigation of her murder since he'd be one of the last people to see her alive.

(Maybe the very last.)

The voice rose up from nowhere, but he flicked it away just as fast.

Pursuant to that, he'd have to inform Captain Reardon and the investigatory unit then file a formal report detailing his activities of June second and any others back to day one, whenever that was. The sixty-four-dollar question was how could he justify that when he could neither recall nor convince himself that he had ever visited Terry Farina's apartment? So far, no evidence had surfaced of his ever having stepped foot in 123 Payson Road.

(Thank you, God!)

Even to preempt possible suspicion, he'd make himself look worse claiming he couldn't recall anything beyond a beer with her at Conor Larkins.

“Gee, guys, I called her at 5:53 when I found her sunglasses, then woke up the next morning when the captain called.”

“How come no record of the call?”

“Guess I dialed
^*
67 without thinking.”

“Why block caller ID?”

“Beats me.”

Not only could he be suspended for incompetence and/or a cover-up, but they'd mount a full-scale investigation of him only to find nothing. But imagine Dana's delight once the word got out that he had graduated from Sylvia Nevins to a murdered stripper.

SHIT!

No way. Not going to happen, at least not until he could figure out what the hell he had done in that fifteen-hour hole.

Steve took a long hot shower and put on his pajamas and went into the kitchen, where he found a glass and the bottle of scotch. It was about three-quarters full. He could feel it tug at him like a mistress. What he wanted to do was get rip-roaring drunk. Maybe down half the bottle and fill it back up with water to pretend virtuousness. But then he'd wake up feeling like roadkill, and he had to take Dana to her plastic surgeon.

He filled the glass with ice and poured himself a single shot then put the bottle away. He settled at the kitchen table.

The C.S.S. report had detailed all prints found in the victim's apartment, but none that belonged to anyone on record in their criminal database. Nor his own.

The lab was still out on hair and fiber analysis. As for leads, Farina's ex-boyfriend's alibi checked out. On the day of her death, he was in Scranton, Pennsylvania, at a handball tournament that was documented on the local cable station. Background checks on other Kingsbury clients so far had turned up nothing. As of yet, they had no person of interest.

“Focus,” he said aloud, and stared into the glass.

Dana had said that she had called him several times to remind him about the air conditioner. That meant sometime after 5:53 he had turned off his PDA, which he never did. And when he got home he neglected to recharge it, which he did nightly. The other possibility was that the battery had run down on its own and his brain was too fried to remember. That would explain why it was dead the next morning, forcing Reardon to call his landline.

“Jesus!” He dumped the drink into the sink, popped a 1 mg. Ativan, and went to bed. For several minutes he tossed around the sheets until drowsiness brought him under.

But he was disturbed by the wildest dream. He was in Terry Farina's bedroom, where she was trussed up on her bed, her huge blue-black head held up by the stocking on an impossibly stretched neck. Suddenly her head snapped up. “Who did this to me? Who did this to me?” Her mouth was a purple puckered hole opening and closing like that of a fish, but her words were perfectly articulate. He began to speak, trying to explain that he was sorry for what had happened to her, when magically she jumped off the bed and pulled him onto her. The next moment he was having sex with her, an enormous red bush of hair cascading over him like a hood and that hideous blue dead face pressed onto his, that grouper mouth sucking against his own and threatening to suffocate him.

He must have yelped himself awake because he woke up gasping.

The room was black and still, the clock said 2:35, and half the bedding was on the floor. He got up and went to the toilet, telling himself that the dream meant nothing, that there was no hidden message being sent up from the boys down in mission control. That cops had nightmares about victims lots of times. It came with the job. You sucked it up and moved on.

But this dream had left his head feeling toxic. For more than an hour he tossed around in his bed until he broke down and popped two more Lorazepams to settle his mind to sleep, because what gnawed on his brain was the realization that the nightmare woman was Dana.