Painting With Fire (18 page)

Chapter 39: In the Madhouse

Claudia knew it was a dream right away. Her mother was the one wearing the black robes and banging the gavel.

She looked around the courtroom and saw the whole cast of characters lined up in rows of wooden benches. A whole family of victims and witnesses tied together by murder, drugs and arson. It was like a funeral. It was like a wedding. There was darkness and there was celebration.

Mr. and Mrs. Johnson sat holding hands next to her on one side. On the other was Steve Jackson’s mother and siblings wearing black and taking swigs of Miller High Life in champagne flutes.

Teary
, bloodshot somber eyes mingled with giddy, flashing smiles full of sharpened teeth. They wanted justice.

Tom staggered up on his crutches and read the sheet of paper saying Alice was convicted of three counts of murder, two counts of attempted murder and assorted drug charges. When the sentence was read, Alice kept on smirking.

“You killed three people,” Steve Jackson’s mother screamed at her. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

“Three?” Alice laughed then opened wide her mouth and swallowed the tiny, frail woman.
The skin on her cheeks stretched out in pale sheets snaked with blue veins as they expanded.

Claudia knew it was a dream, but she still woke up gasping with her mouth open. She held onto Tom tight but he didn’t wake up. She tried to match her breathing to the steady rhythm of his. It took her a moment to remember where they were.

The room was pitch black like the hotel, but without the constant hum of a small, cheap refrigerator nearby. It was the new apartment.

She got up and tiptoed to the bathroom, closed the door and turned on the fluorescent light. As she buttoned her
blouse, she looked up in the mirror and noticed how pale and washed out she looked.

Claudia quietly stepp
ed out and took the train to a job interview downtown. But the dream hummed in the background of her mind as the train cars jostled down the tracks. Every time the doors swung open and shut, Claudia was looking at each new person, wondering who they were, if she could trust them, if they were her.

Would they ever catch Alice? Claudia wondered. It was like she had vanished in plain sight. She couldn’t make up her mind which name to call her, Angel or Alice. Even the police weren’t sure which name came first or if either were ever her real name.

Claudia got off the train, walked down rickety wooden steps and scampered toward the black office tower like an ant under the skyscrapers.

She couldn’t seem to forget. Every time she walked through a crowd, she searched for Angel’s face.

She kept hunting for her. Her mind could never rest. She kept finding pieces, fragments of the killer everywhere around her. Claudia would catch blond streaks of hair swishing off someone’s shoulder. In the revolving glass doors, she’d spot a pair of brilliant blue eyes. Someone else would be wearing the same black pencil skirt in the crowd. Her mind assembled the pieces together until she felt her presence, until she could’ve sworn she was standing behind her. Claudia always wanted to turn and look, but she knew it was crazy.

Why would she come after her now? What good would it do? She had to let go of the fear. She would tell herself this silently while sitting in
a bathroom stall, with her hands at her temples, pushing back her hair.

She just knew somewhere else Alice was setting up shop. Somewhere else, she was smiling and charming her way into hearts and minds and poisoning others. She was busy asking people if they had given themselves to Jesus and trying to steal their souls.

Chapter
40: Divine Love, Divine Death

“All you really need is divine love,” Alice said, with a smile, to the nervous teen in the lobby. “Would you like to give it a try?”

She put the dime bag in the girl’s hand and closed her hand over hers for a moment, before the receptionist reappeared.

“Let me know if you ever need anything else, Tanja. Maybe a job hooking up your friends?” she said, squeezing the girl’s hand. “I’m happy to help you.”

It wasn’t the kind of outreach the resource center had in mind. Alice had just started her new job at a nonprofit helping keep youth off the street in St. Louis. She was going by a new name now, to
o.

She spilled a bit of coffee as she sat the mug down on the desk. She wiped it of with a Kleenex and sat down to read her e-mails.

She was sorting through the Google alerts about Tom and Claudia, clicking on the headlines about his latest art show and smiling to herself. It would be so easy for her to find them. She had people who could take care of them for her, but what was the fun in that?

When her boss walked by, she switched to an Excel accounting sheet that showed all of the nonprofit’s accounts.

It’s so easy, she thought, so very easy to keep tabs on people and money these days. Her boss paused and gave her a funny look.

“It’s nice to see someone in accounting who seems to enjoy it,” the lady said. “You’re always smiling.”

Alice felt relieved that morning. Starting a new branch of the business was always better without witnesses and she had made some changes for the better. So many people knew her face she felt she had to. It didn’t seem to matter that much here, but it was still good to take precautions.

She’d straightened her hair into a bob and taken on a new name. Her eyebrows were waxed into thin, arched lines that hung over a new pair of glasses. She stopped wearing contacts. She missed the feeling of power she got from a higher vantage point, but she was two inches shorter without heels. Strangely enough, her whole posture seemed to change in flats. Her spine was no longer proudly arched. Her shoulders rounded forward meekly. But she wasn’t a meek woman.

The night before she had disposed of a few things, including the white van. She and Dave had parked it up high on the bluffs near the river, wiped it out and sat in it one last time.

“The difference is amazing,” Dave had told her, touching her hair with his latex-gloved hand. “Still sexy, though.”

Alice had laughed. They had sat in the back of the van and he had tried to kiss her. She had pushed him away.

“Do you have any white cross for me?” He had asked. “I can always count on you to help me.”

She smiled and handed him a plastic bag.

“You’re an Angel,” he said.

“Divine love, baby, it’s all you need,” she said.

Alice did have a marketing degree and the idea of a brand name had always appealed to her. It never caught on, but it was an inside joke that made both of them smile. She didn’t like the obvious look of Dave’s brown, rotting teeth.

“You’re not having any?” he said.

“Never do,” she said. “I prefer to sit back and watch. I’ve dedicated my whole life t
o helping drug addicts feel better.” She smirked.

She looked away as Dave pulled out his needle and spoon and slumped back in his car seat. He started yawning almost immediately and closing his eyes and his breath slowed down.

“When I was younger, I used to wonder, how come you never hear about female serial killers?” Alice mused, with her arm around him and her head on his shoulder. “It’s cause we never get caught. We don’t fit the profile.”

She leaned over and held down his tattooed arms as he struggled to breathe. Each breath was a gasp. It was difficult to make out the blurred patterns on his purplish-red skin anymore.

“Sorry, honey,” she said. “It’s just, well, that face is hard to forget. It’s one of the things I love about you, but it’s damn inconvenient when you are trying to start over.”

D
ave’s arms flopped as he tried to get up one last time, then fell loose at his sides. His unconscious eyes were open but no longer blinking. The pale skin on his nostrils was already starting to turn a purplish blue, the same hue as his lips.

“God, I love prescription
barbiturates. Don’t be mad at me, Dave. It’s your own special goodbye blend. I’ve been poisoning you a long time, and you’ve always thanked me for it.”

It had taken her just a few tries on other people to get the ingredients just right. The ones who lived hadn’t complained. They just said it relaxed them. He was just going to drift off into a deep
, breathless sleep.

She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. He wasn’t as pretty anymore as he had once been. His deep brown eyes had sunken into his face. His cheekbones were harsh and angular under his pale, blue-tinted skin. It was like their years
together had been decades.

“I’ll miss you, and don’t worry.” she whispered. “Jesus is waiting.”

She slammed the back door and reached inside the front driver’s side to take off the parking brake. The van started to roll back slowly into the river as she got onto her bicycle and pedaled away.

She didn’t need to hear the sound of crashing water. Somehow everything always seemed to go her way. She had brains. Dave didn’t have any left between the pounding of drugs and fists. It was that simple, she thought.

Stan stood at the top of the bluff looking down at the van stuck in the muddy riverbank. The forensic investigators and emergency personnel scrambled to pull the vehicle away from the rush of water with a web of cables and machinery wrapped around trees. The body was already pulled out and lay on a stretcher under a white sheet. Three guys dressed in black and yellow jackets were pushing it slowly uphill. A path through the thin trees showed where the van had plowed downhill.

The victim’s brother was at the entrance to the parking lot, mumbling to himself with a dazed look on his pale face. Stan had told him not to come past the police tape, but the thin, gaunt man kept creeping up.

“Sir, can I ask you some questions,” Stan said. It was more of a demand.

“I just want to see if it’s really him,” the man said. “I want to see him.”

“You have to wait for the coroner,” Stan said.

Stan didn’t look forward to seeing the body again. It didn’t look like a man. Like a dead fish, it was purple and soggy with whitewashed eyes after a few days in the riverbank. But the fact of the matter was it wasn’t the bodies that bothered him as much as the crushed faces of the people who knew them. Nothing could hurt a dead man. A dead man was no longer weak, no longer suffering. But the pain of the living, that was hard not to feel.

“Sir, do you have any idea what might have happened?”

“No,” he said.

“Do you know who he might have been with?”

“He had a girlfriend. You should ask her.

“They were going to move soon. He talked about starting a new life in St. Louis with her. He told me not to tell anyone where he was going, but I guess it don’t matter now.”

“Why wouldn’t he want people to know where he was going?” Stan knew the answer, but the question would tell him something about the man’s brother, how honest he was or how naive.

“I turned out all right, you know.” He scratched the short brown hair on the back of his head uneasily. “I know it ain’t glamorous working for a gas station, but I pay my bills. I got a daughter. My brother wasn’t always, well, I know he did some things that he shouldn’t have.”

“Like what?”

“You should’ve seen him before the drugs. He used to love sports, had a shot at being a boxer.” The brother’s blood-shot, brown eyes wandered down the cliff through the trees. “But then it didn’t seem to matter to him after the drugs, after he met her.

“That bitch was no good for him.” His eyes narrowed at the corners as he fought tears. “You should talk to her. I probably shouldn’t admit this to a cop, but I’ll fucking kill her, if I see her.”

“Who?”

“Angel.”

“Is this her?” Stan asked.

It was one of the best black and white sketches of a suspect Stan had seen in his career. Her eyes were round, nose long and narrow, her lips full, her cheekbones high, eyebrows arched. Based on pictures of Tom’s work, it looked just like her and still, no one came forward.

The dead man’s brother nodded. And then another officer came to collect him. “Time to view the body.”

Stan stayed there at the top of the bluff and looked down at the scene below. He could hear the man sobbing in the distance. He tried not to listen, but he could make some of the words out. “Davey, my baby brother.”

Stan leaned up against a tree trunk and closed his eyes for a moment. The investigators were already squabbling over whether it was a suicide or accidental death, but he still had to let the FBI know about the connection. They were taking their sweet time catching up with her. He wished he were in charge of the investigation.

He knew that Alice liked to prey on addicts to build her business. Maybe she’d try to do it again. It was a slim and tedious lead to follow with countless phone calls to every nonprofit, rehab organization in St. Louis he could find online. If only the boy had talked sooner. If only someone would talk.

People didn’t know how dangerous it was to keep their damn mouths shut.