He looked up, and saw Laura’s father staring at him.
Laura stood in the nursery. Miriam said, “Come on, let’s get you to bed. Come on now.”
The nursery was a haunted place. Laura heard the ghost-sounds of a baby, and she touched the brightly colored mobile over the crib and sent it gently twirling. She was crying again, the tears stinging on her chapped cheeks. She heard David crying, too, his voice waxing and falling in the little room. Stuffed animals grinned from the crib. Laura picked up a teddy bear and held it against herself, and she sobbed quietly onto its brown fur.
“Laura!” her mother said right behind her. “Come to bed this minute!”
That voice, that voice. Do what I say when I say it. Jump, Laura! Jump! Be successful, Laura! Marry someone with money and social standing! Stop wearing those awful tie-dyed blouses and bluejeans! Fix your hair like a lady! Grow up, Laura! For God’s sake, grow up!
She knew she was stretched to her limit. One more small stretch and she would snap. David was with an insane woman named Ginger Coles, who’d slashed an old man’s throat on Saturday morning and killed an FBI agent on Saturday evening. Between those two events, Laura had given her baby to murderous hands. She remembered the red crust under a fingernail. Blood, of course. The old man’s blood. That thought alone was enough to rip her off her hinges and send her shambling to a madhouse. Hang on! she thought. Dear God, hang on!
“Did you hear me?” Miriam prodded.
Laura’s crying stopped. She wiped her tears on the teddy bear, and she turned to face her mother. “This is…my house,” she said. “My house. You’re a guest here. In my house, I’ll do what I please when I please.”
“This isn’t the time to act fool—”
“LISTEN TO ME!” she screamed, and Miriam was knocked backward by the power of her daughter’s voice as surely as if she’d been punched. “Give me some room to breathe! I can’t breathe with you on my neck!”
The older woman, a scrapper, regained her cool composure. “You’re out of control,” she said. “I understand that.” Doug and Franklin were coming along the corridor. “I think you need a sedative.”
“I NEED MY BABY! THAT’S WHAT I NEED!”
“She’s losing her mind,” Miriam said matter-of-factly to her husband.
“Get out! Get out!” Laura shoved her mother, who gasped with horror at the touch, and then Laura slammed the nursery door in their three stunned faces and turned the latch.
“Want me to call the doctor?” she heard Doug ask as she leaned against the door.
“I think you’d better.” Franklin speaking.
“No, let her alone. She wants to be alone, we’ll let her be alone. Good God, I always knew she had an unstable temper! Yes, we’ll let her be alone!” Her voice was raised for her daughter’s benefit. “Franklin, call the Hyatt and get us a room! We won’t stay here and breathe down her neck!”
She almost unlocked the door. Almost. But no, it was quiet in here. It was calm. Let them go to the Hyatt, and let them sulk. She needed space, even if it had to be within these four haunted walls.
Laura sat on the floor with the teddy bear, dim light drifting through the window blinds. She had given David to a murderess. She had put her child into bloodstained hands. She closed her eyes and shrieked inside, where no one but herself could hear.
An hour or so later, there was a tentative knock at the door.
“Laura?” It was Doug. “The FBI’s here with the pictures.”
She got up, her legs in need of blood, and unlocked the nursery. The teddy bear remained clamped under her arm as she went out. In the den, she found a middle-aged man in a pin-striped suit, his hair sandy brown and cut to a stubble on the sides. He had warm brown eyes and a good smile, and Laura saw him glance quickly at the teddy bear and then pretend he hadn’t seen it. Her father had remained at the house, but her mother had retreated to the Hyatt; the battle of wills had begun.
The FBI agent’s name was Neil Kastle, “with a K,” he told her as she sat down in a chair. He had some photographs, both color and black and white, he wanted her to look at. He opened a manila envelope with large fingers not used to small tasks, and he spread a half-dozen pictures out on the coffee table next to a book on Matisse. They were all pictures of women, some of them face-on—mug shots—and others at an angle. There was one picture of a big, heavyset woman aiming a rifle at a bank clerk. Another showed a husky woman glancing back over her shoulder as she was getting into a black Camaro; light glinted off a pistol in her hand.
“These are women from our Most Wanted list,” Kastle told her. “Six of them who match Ginger Coles in size, age, and build. We put the police sketch in our computer and assigned the variables, and that’s what we came up with.”
One of the women, tall and blond-haired, wore bell bottoms, an American-flag belt, and a green paisley blouse. She was grinning broadly, and she held a hand grenade. “Some of them are old,” Laura said.
“Right. They go back…oh…twenty years or so.”
“You’ve been looking for some of these women for twenty years?” Franklin asked, peering over Laura’s shoulder.
“One of them, yes. One’s from the late seventies, one’s from 1983, and the other three are from 1985 to the present.”
“What crimes did they do?” Franklin persisted.
“An assortment,” Kastle said. “Look at those good and hard, Mrs. Clayborne.”
“They look alike to me. All of them: same size, same everything.”
“Their names and statistics are on the back.”
Laura turned over the picture of the bank robber. Margie Cummings, AKA Margie Grimes, AKA Linda Kay Souther, AKA Gwen Becker. Height 5 feet 101/2, hair brown, eyes blue-green, birthplace Orren, Kentucky. She looked at the back of the black Camaro picture: Sandra June McHenry, AKA Susan Foster, AKA June Foster. Height 5 feet 9, hair brown, eyes gray, birthplace Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
“Why do you think it might be one of these women?” Franklin asked. “Couldn’t it just be…like…a crazy woman or somebody you don’t even know about?”
“The city police are putting their own list of mug shots together. That’ll include local fugitives. The reason we decided to go back into our Most Wanted file was because of the shotgun.”
“What about it?”
“Ginger Coles knew we’d find her apartment. She set the trap to take out the first man through the door. That means she has a certain… shall we say…mindset. An aptitude for such things. She scrubbed her apartment down pretty well, too. All the doorknobs and drawer grips were wiped clean. Even her records were wiped. We did get some partial prints off a rifle we found in a closet, and a good thumbprint off the shower head.”
“So does that print match any of these women?” Doug asked.
“I can’t say,” Kastle answered. “They haven’t let me know yet”
Laura turned over another photo. Debra Guesser, AKA Debbie Smith, AKA Debra Stark. Height 6 feet, hair reddish-brown, eyes blue. Birthplace New Orleans, Louisiana. She looked closely at that face: it was similar to the face of Ginger Coles, but there was a small scar on her upper lip that put a sneer in her smile. “This one…maybe,” she said. “I don’t remember the scar.”
“That’s okay. Look hard and take your time.” He didn’t tell her that he was testing her. Three of the women, including Debra Guesser, had been convicted and were now in federal prisons. A fourth, Margie Cummings, had died in 1987.
Laura turned over the picture of the bell-bottomed girl. Mary Terrell, AKA Mary Terror. Height 6 feet, hair brown, eyes gray-blue, birthplace Richmond, Virginia. “This says she has brown hair, but her hair’s blond in the picture.”
“Dyed blond,” Kastle said. “The statistics are based on family records, so they might appear a little different in the photos.”
Laura stared at Mary Terrell’s face. The woman—fresh-faced and innocent, in a way—wore a relaxed, toothy grin, and the grenade dangled from a finger. “This is th
e oldest one?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Ginger Coles is…harder looking. This woman’s close, too, but…I don’t know.”
“Put about twenty years of rough living on that woman’s face,” Kastle suggested.
“I don’t know. I can’t see it.”
“How can a woman hide from the FBI for twenty years?” Franklin took the photo and Laura went on to the next. “It seems impossible!”
“It’s a mighty big country. Plus there’s Canada and Mexico to consider. People change their hair and clothes, they create new identities, and they learn how to walk and talk differently. And you’d be amazed at what some of the fugitives get away with: we found one who’d been a park ranger at Yellowstone for about seven years. Another was the veep of a bank in Missouri. I know of a third who became a fishing boat captain in the Keys, and we got hold of him when he ran for mayor of Key West. See, people don’t really look at other people.” He sat down in a chair opposite Laura. “Folks are trusting. If somebody tells you something, you’re likely to believe it. In every city there’s somebody who’ll take money, no questions asked, to forge you a new driver’s license, birth certificate, anything you want. So you get yourself a job where they don’t care to ask too many questions, and you burrow underground like a smart little mole.” He folded his hands together as Laura started through the photos again. “These Most Wanted fugitives grow eyes in the backs of their heads. They learn to smell the wind and listen to the railroad tracks. They probably don’t sleep too well at night, but they keep their smarts sharp. See, most people—law officers included—have a big failing: they forget. The FBI never forgets. We’ve got computers to keep our memories up-to-date.”
“Who’s this in the background?” Doug asked, looking at the photo of Mary Terrell.
Kastle took it, and Laura looked, too. Mary Terrell was standing on dewy green grass, her feet in clunky sandals. A blue sky, somewhat faded, was overhead and the camera operator’s slim shadow lay on the grass. But in the back-ground atop a small green rise stood a blurred figure, one arm cocked to throw a yellow Frisbee.
“I don’t know. Looks like the picture was taken in a”
Laura took the photo from Kastle’s hand. She had been looking at the woman’s face, and she’d not noticed this before. Still, it was blurry and hard to make out. “I need a magnifying glass.”
Doug got up. Kastle leaned forward, squinting. “What’re you looking at?”
“There. The Frisbee. See it?”
“Yeah. What about it?”
“Right there. You can see the top of the Frisbee, the way it’s angled. See?” Her heart was pounding. Doug brought her a magnifying glass, and she held it over the yellow Frisbee. She positioned the glass out to its highest magnification from the picture, just about to lose its focus altogether. “There,” she said. “There it is. Look.”
Kastle did. “I see it,” he said.
Two black dots of eyes and a semicircle of a mouth had been painted on the Frisbee’s lid. It was a Smiley Face, about to be spun to an unknown destination.
Laura held the magnifying glass over Mary Terrell’s face, studied it carefully.
She knew her enemy.
Time had changed this woman, yes. It had made her heavier and broken the smoothness of her skin; it had razored her prettiness down to the raw mean. But the real resemblance was in the eyes, those gray-blue soul mirrors. You had to have a magnifying glass, and even then you had to look hard and close. The eyes had a dead, hot hatred in them. They didn’t go with the blond hippie locks or the Crest-white smile. The eyes were the same ones that had looked down upon her as Laura had given up her baby to bloodstained hands. Yes. Yes. They were the same, but older. Yes. The same.
“It’s her,” Laura said.
At once Kastle was kneeling beside her, looking at the photo from Laura’s perspective. “Are you sure?”
“I…” No doubts. Those eyes. Big hands. The Smiley Face in the background. No doubts. “It’s Ginger Coles,” she said.
“You’re identifying Mary Terrell as the woman who took your infant?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “Yes. It’s her. This is the woman.” She felt a double shattering within her: relief and horror.
“May I use your telephone?” Kastle took the photograph and went into the kitchen. In another moment, Laura heard him say, “We’ve got a positive ID. Hold on to your hat.”
When Kastle returned, Laura was sitting gray-faced, her arms huddled around herself and Franklin stroking her back. Doug stood at a window across the room, like an outcast. “All right.” Kastle sat down again, and put the photo on the coffee table. “We’re getting a file together on Mary Terrell. All available pictures, prints, family whereabouts, relatives, everything. But I guess there are things you ought to know that I can tell you right now.”
“Just find my baby. Please. That’s all I want.”
“I understand that. I have to tell you, though, that Mary Terrell—Mary Terror—probably killed a ten-year-old boy in the woods around Mableton just recently. She took his rifle, and we matched the serial numbers with the seller. So that makes three people she’s killed that we know about, not counting the others.”
“The others? What others?”
“As I recall, six or seven police officers, a university professor and his wife, and a documentary filmmaker. All those murders took place in the late sixties and early seventies. Mary Terrell was a member of the Storm Front. Do you know what that was?”
Laura had heard of it before, yes. A militant terrorist group like the Symbionese Liberation Army. Mark Treggs had talked about it in Burn This Book.
“I was in the Miami bureau when it was going on, but I kept up with it,” Kastle continued. “Mary Terrell was a political killer. She believed that she was an executioner for the masses. The whole bunch of them did. You know how that used to be: a group of hippies stoned all the time and listening to weird music, and sooner or later they started thinking about how much fun it might be to kill somebody.”
Laura nodded vacantly, but part of her was recalling that she had been a hippie who got stoned and listened to weird music, though she’d never wanted to murder anyone.
“The Bureau’s been looking for her since the early seventies. Why she broke cover now and took your baby, I don’t know. Now I guess I’m getting ahead of myself, because we won’t be certain until we match some fingerprints, but I have to tell you this: Mary Terrell is very, very dangerous.” He didn’t tell her that Mary Terrell was held in such awe that there was a target dummy in her likeness at the FBI’s Quantico firing range. Nor did he tell her that less than an hour before he’d left the office, the Washington Bureau had come back with a four-point match on the shower-head thumbprint with Mary Terrell’s right thumbprint. But he’d wanted Laura’s positive ID on the photo to clinch it. Funny he hadn’t noticed the Smiley Face Frisbee. The big chiefs in Washington had to be chewing their pencils for action on this one, particularly since a fellow agent had been murdered. “We’re going to do everything we can to find her. Do you believe that?”
She nodded again. “My baby. She won’t hurt my baby, will she?”
“I don’t see why she would.” He turned the thought of the baby box with its mutilated dolls out of his mind. “She took your baby for a reason, but I don’t think she plans on hurting him.”
“Is she insane?” Laura asked.
This was a difficult question. Kastle shifted his position in the chair, thinking it over. The baby box said she might very well be crazy, like an animal that’s lived too long in a hole gnawing on old bones. “You know,” he said quietly, “I wonder about some of those people from the sixties. You know the ones I mean: they hated everything and everybody, and they wanted to break the world apart and start it all over again in their image. They fed on hate, day and night. They breathed it, in their attics and cellars, while they burned their incense and candles. I wonder what they did with that hate when the candles went
out.”
Kastle began to put away the photographs, and he closed the envelope. “I suppose I’ll go out and face the reporters now. I won’t give them much, just enough to whet their appetite. You work for the Constitution, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You understand what I mean, then. I won’t ask you to come out with me. That’ll be for later. The longer we can keep the press interested, the better chance we have of finding Mary Terrell quickly. So we have to play them a little bit.” He smiled. “Such is life. Mr. Clayborne, would you come outside with me?”
“Why me? I wasn’t even in the room!”
“Right, but you’re a good human interest angle. Plus you can’t answer any question in detail. I’ll handle all the detail work. Okay?”
“Okay,” Doug said reluctantly.
Kastle stood up, and Doug braced himself for the onslaught. There was a question Laura had to ask: “When … when you find her…David won’t be hurt, will he?”
“We’ll get your baby back for you,” Kastle said. “You can count on it.” Then he and Doug went out front to where the reporters waited.
Laura’s father held her hand and talked quietly and reassuringly to her, but Laura barely heard him. She was thinking of a madwoman holding a baby on a balcony, and a SWAT sniper sighting in for the kill. She closed her eyes, remembering the double pop pop of two shots, and the baby’s head exploding.
It couldn’t happen to David that way.
No.
It couldn’t.
No.
She put her hands to her face and wept heartbroken tears, and Franklin sat there, not knowing what to do.
4
Hope, Mother
IN THE BIG RED brick house in richmond that had been built in 1853, the telephone rang.
It was approaching nine o’clock on Sunday night. A large-boned woman with silver hair, her face broken by lines and her nose as sharp as a Confederate sword, sat in a high-backed leather chair and stared at her elderly husband through chill gray eyes. One of the new Perry Mason series shows was on television, and both the woman and her husband Edgar enjoyed watching Raymond Burr. The man sat in a wheelchair, his body shrunken in blue silk pajamas, his head lolled over to one side and a pink flap of tongue showing. His hearing was not what it used to be before the stroke six years earlier, but the woman knew he could hear the telephone because his eyes had widened and he was shaking more than usual.