Stranglehold. Part 39

"Domestic disputes." He nodded. She knew as well as he did that they could be pure h.e.l.l. "I will," he said.

As he started back down the drive he radioed in for backup.

"We're already on the way," the dispatcher told him. "The Fortunato woman called a few minutes ago. We got a car out as soon as she did. I got to tell you, this one really got screwed up, Ralph. Morton thought it was nothing all that urgent on the first call. But there wasn't any mention of weapons then, you know?"

"I know. Don't worry about it. I think everybody screwed up somewhere on this one."

He signed off. And Morton probably the least of them, he thought. Everybody'd f.u.c.ked up. f.u.c.ked up bad. The judge, lawyers. Everybody.

Even him. Though he didn't really know how. There must have been something he'd missed, something he hadn't done that needed doing and that now saw him out here in the middle of the night trying to outdrive a lady with a gun.

To h.e.l.l with it, he thought, now's what's important. Now you've got a chance to do something. And he drove toward the mountain.

The wooden beams jolted her in the car seat and then she was over the bridge. She slowed to thirty on the old dirt road and drove a little ways and then cut the headlights and stopped the car and got out. There was no point announcing herself.

All the way here she'd been praying to a G.o.d she rarely even considered that Arthur hadn't hurt him, that the man raving in the kitchen and taunting her on the phone had burned himself out, exhausted with sheer craziness, and gone to bed. Alone, she thought, saying it like a mantra. Please G.o.d.

Alone.

This had to be the end of it. She could take no more from Arthur Danse and neither could Robert. The terror had to stop now one way or another. She'd take Robert and run. Where didn't matter. It didn't matter either anymore that they'd probably be poor, that the work she was trained for was going to be forever out of the question. Poor was still alive and poor was still unabused.

The house was brightly lit. Upstairs and down.

So they hadn't gone to bed.

No matter.

She cut across the field and felt the tall wet gra.s.s brush her right hand holding the gun. She brought it up to waist-level, the weight of it comforting in a way no gun's feel or heft had ever seemed remotely comforting to her. It was as though the gun were the ally she had needed all along but had never thought of. Not Sansom, not Andrea Stone, not the courts and not the police. Just this cold weight of metal.

Her final advocate.

She stepped up toward the porch. She knew the front door would be open. She knew that all the doors would be open. It was inevitable.

It was all of it inevitable and always had been.

He saw the headlights sweep the bedroom curtains as the car came up the hill and then immediately go dim. Robert didn't see them but he did.

She was coming.

She or Duggan.

It was starting. Something.

Trespa.s.sers, he thought. Thou shalt not trespa.s.s.

No way thou shalt, you f.u.c.king pieces of s.h.i.+t.

He unlocked the door and saw his mother and father standing there looking at him and the 9mm semiautomatic in his hand. His mother looked mad at him. The old man looked nervous and worried.

So what else was new.

"Daddy, grab the shotgun," he said. "We've got company."

It felt good to say that to his father. To command him.

He knew that when this was over he'd be in a position to command both of them. Because they both would be just as guilty as he was for what was about to happen here-as guilty as he'd ever been for anything in his life. They'd carry that.

He could use that against them the rest of their lives. It was about time.

It was whatever he wanted now.

He pushed past them down the stairs.

"Get the shotgun, daddy," he said. "And I mean move."

She'd been right, the door wasn't locked. She turned the doork.n.o.b and it opened with barely a sound and she saw Arthur in the doorway by the stairs, a black shape pointing at her, backlit by the light from the kitchen and she felt something slam into her chest and throw her back against the door and then she heard the explosion.

She raised the gun and fired, she didn't know how many times, and the figure fell away. She looked down at her body and saw there was blood all over her. She saw movement in the kitchen and then Arthur's father was coming toward her out of there shouting something that she was far too deaf to hear and she saw the double-barrel shotgun in his hands pointed in her direction so she fired again. Plaster showered down over her head and shoulders as the shotgun flashed and roared. Harry fell and lay slumped against the kitchen door.

She saw Ruth behind him and she tried to raise the gun again but the strength was gone from her arm and she felt herself sliding down the front door to the rough nappy doormat that lay askew between her knees. Ruth was shouting too, her face twisted and red and awful and angry but she couldn't hear.

Lydia saw her move quickly from Harry's body to Arthur's and when she got to Arthur she stopped and fell to her knees and put her hands to her cheeks and rocked there. She reached down and touched his face and then stared a moment at her b.l.o.o.d.y hand then she was screaming again, looking up at Robert in his pyjamas standing there frozen halfway down the stairs and screaming, not at him she thought or even at her or at anybody at all but in some mad incredible rage that Lydia could almost understand, could almost feel and know.

The room was swimming.

She saw Robert gaze in her direction, saw him register all the blood across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and belly, saw the terror in his eyes and heard herself dimly and far away saying, "It's okay, baby. Everything's all right now. n.o.body's going to hurt you anymore. It's all right, baby."

She felt hands at her shoulders, big hands, calloused hands, and looked up into Ralph Duggan's ashen face and heard what must have been sirens and then he was fading away into light and darkness and she couldn't see him, couldn't feel him, she could only hear the ringing in her ears until even that was gone. She imagined she felt her heartbeat And then there was only silence and darkness and an end to what she had come here for, to where time and maybe all her life had brought her.

Epilogue, Part One

Identification

There was a subtle reek to human death that not even cold and disinfectant could subvert-the dark wet mold on a decaying flower, bland meat only just beginning to turn. They stood and looked down at the corpse of Arthur Danse and Duggan felt the young woman tremble beside him and thought, h.e.l.l, you still scare people, Arthur. I guess you've just got a knack for it.

He'd read the coroner's report by now and noted the clean black wound that had ended him, Lydia's first shot and a cla.s.sic-straight through the heart. He imagined her luck and the shattered organ sewn up inside him. Her two other shots would not have done the trick. One had chipped the left side of his pelvic girdle before careening off into the wall a foot above his head. The other had sheared a flap of skin off his cheek and cracked his lower jaw. Knowing Arthur, he would have kept on coming.

Not luck, he thought. Providence. Finally in all of this, the hand of mercy.

It was the broken jaw that was his problem though. Marge Bernhardt had not been able to identify Danse through the morgue photos. It was not surprising. The dead, he thought, simply did not look like the living. And the smiling amiable snapshots they'd taken from his home seemed not to correspond to the memory of that dark figure attempting to nail her to a tree in the frozen woods. His only hope now was that despite the facial wound and the pale softening of his features there would be something about the ma.s.s of him, the man in his totality, that would jar her into a moment of recognition.

But it wasn't going to happen.

"No," she said. "Or maybe. Oh, G.o.d! I can't tell!"

She hardly knew Duggan. Yet she leaned into his arms as though urged by a gust of wind.

He held her gently until the shaking subsided though her body and even her hands were cold and then he asked her to look again.

She shook her head.

"I keep thinking," she said. "What if it's not him? What if he's still out there? I know you want to-what do you call it?-close the books on this. But what if it's not him? And then I say it is."

He understood. This was a brave intelligent woman and she needed to be sure. So did he. If he was pretty certain that Arthur Danse had lived his double life so completely and successfully that not his wife nor even his parents had ever fully known what he was capable of, if he had escaped even in death, Duggan would just have to live with that.

The woman was right. What if he was out there-trolling the streets in a dark car, some splintered soul mate to Arthur Danse who was of him yet not him, searching out the vulnerable under the winter moon.

He pulled up the sheet.

She was right. In the long run Danse didn't matter. Danse was legion. It was what they had inherited even in this quiet town, and it would never pay to close the books on that, not for a moment.

He led her quietly from the room and closed the door and listened to the tired weight of their footsteps on the concrete floor and imagined all the bodies settling cold into their frozen beds behind him and thought of how many would follow.

Epilogue.

Safety

The reporter studied the face of the woman in front of her and contrasted that with the photos she'd seen and the news footage covering the woman's arrest and trial. She knew that Lydia Danse was just two years older than she was but she looked older by nearly a decade. She had put on weight. She was still quite an attractive woman in the reporter's estimation, but the eyes looked puffy from lack of sleep, the mouth more pinched than in the photos.

The reporter, who had no children of her own but who had talked on the telephone with Andrea Stone at DCYS and the woman's own lawyer and who had listened to her firsthand story for almost an hour now, could fully understand the change.

Over a year later it was still clearly difficult for her to talk about the killings and what had happened to her son. Knowing most of the details of the case beforehand the reporter thought she had guts even to agree to the interview. When he heard what Lydia had to say, she amended the word guts to courage.

Her article was on the subject of why women kill. She was now some three months into researching it. She'd seen good deal of courage. Some madness.

And a lot of desperation.

"So his bullet grazed your lung," she said. "Then pa.s.sed through your back."

"That's right. They found it in the door behind me. I was lucky because the bullet was the kind with a metal jacket and that meant the exit wound was clean, not as bad as it might have been. I was in the hospital a couple of weeks. Then they transferred me."

"So your lawyer said they were asking for two hundred thousand dollars in bail?"

She nodded.

"And you didn't pay it."

"I was already incredibly in debt on legal fees as it was."

"In court you used Robert's videotaped confessions to contend that you had reason to believe that he was in danger at the time, at that very moment maybe, that you were afraid he'd be molested again, and that you went to the house to protect him."

"Yes."

"And the state asked for first-degree murder. The death penalty. I find that ... just incredible."

Her smile seemed to say, Believe me, you don't know the half of it. The reporter had yet to see the slightest sign that Lydia Danse was sitting here feeling sorry for herself. Even though it was death by hanging in this state. Even her occasional bout with tears had only spoken of sadness and waste and her son's emotional pain.

She thought that was incredible too.

"They didn't get it, though," she said.

"No, thank G.o.d. They gave me aggravated life."

The reporter took a breath. It was hard not to be furious-she was furious, what was hard was not to show her fury-at the whole d.a.m.n justice system.

"I don't get it. Why not self-defense? He shot you first. Forensics proved it. He couldn't have fired after you did because he was dead the moment your bullet hit him."

"We couldn't get self-defense because I went to the house with the gun. Because I thought about it long enough to take the gun out of my closet and put it in the car and bring it there. That made me the aggressor. That's the way they saw it. There was even a big deal about my not having a carry permit."

"And the videotape?"

She shrugged. "Either they didn't believe the videotape or they chose to discount it. The jury, not the judge. The judge took it into consideration and that's what got me life. My lawyers and I never could figure it out, to tell the truth. One of the jurors came forward later and said that he believed the tape right from the beginning and another came forward and said he never did. I don't know why the ones who did believe Robert voted the way they did. Straight law and order, I guess. I suppose it was the gun."

"You're aware that Ralph Duggan and the State Police had been investigating a number of serial killings at the time. And that these murders apparently have stopped since?"

She nodded again. "I'm glad they've stopped. But it doesn't really matter in my case, does it? They never proved it was Arthur. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn't. But I don't know that it would have mattered to me in court or would even have been admissible even if they did."

The reporter glanced at the uniformed matron in the corner of the conference room to their left. The matron was making an elaborate show of not overhearing them. Gazing off into s.p.a.ce, arms folded in her lap. It was like every prison she'd ever seen. Every sound echoed in there. Every sc.r.a.pe of a chair. The matron was hearing all of it.

The reporter felt strangely vulnerable knowing that. "And you haven't been out of prison since, have you?" she said.

"No."

"And you haven't seen Robert?"