by Robyn Carr
Mike swirled his coffee. “It’s not like he fucked up, Jack. His best is better than what a lot of people get. You can call him every day for the rest of your life to find out Devalian’s status if it makes you feel better.”
“I might,” I said, a long way from feeling secure.
“Whatever it takes, Jack.”
We sat silently for ten minutes when Bodge Scully walked into the cafeteria and bought himself a cup of coffee. He didn’t see us sitting there, so Mike went over to greet him. Bodge suggested we go up to the ward, look around, get it over with.
“You come here often?” I asked, after giving him a hug.
“I spend too much time here. I don’t rest easy anymore. I guess it’ll pass, but for now I feel better when I can check in, see how it goes. You think this is going to help you, Jackie? Seeing where they keep him?”
“I don’t know. I hope so. I had to come back here to get my things together, anyway. And... I can’t sleep yet. Or eat.”
“You’ll come out to the house tonight? Have dinner and stay with us?”
“Thanks, Bodge. We’ll stop by; we’re staying the night at Roberta’s. I’ll never sleep in my old house again.”
The elevator left us outside the locked ward. Bodge and Mike showed a police officer their IDs and vouched for me; we were allowed inside. The hall was long, sterile, and wide. There was an officer leaning against the desk at the nurses’ station with a Styrofoam cup in his hand; he had a view of the entire hall. At the far end of the hall another officer leaned his chair back against the wall. He sat right outside a hospital room. The door was cracked.
Bodge spoke with the officer at the nurses’ station. He was not on the Devalian job, but was assigned to the psychiatric floor. He pointed down the hall to the nurses’ lounge. Bodge thanked him, indicated we should follow, and we walked to a room. Inside was another officer, armed, teetering on the back legs of his folding chair while watching a little television set. He looked over his shoulder and waved. “How ya doin?” he asked.
“Good, Jim, good,” Bodge replied. “Anything happening?”
“ ‘Fraid not. Same old stuff.”
“Explain this contraption to my friend here. Jackie, here, she’s the one put the clamps on our boy.”
“No stuff?” he said, apparently impressed. “I’ll be. Well, what we have here is a two-man ring of protection. One armed officer outside his room, one armed watching the monitor. His bed is centered in the room and we have two closed-circuit sweep cameras at perpendicular angles in operation. This gives us real-time data; everything is taped. Mr. Krump there,” he said, pointing to the set, “has his own tape recorder — reel-to-reel — for his questioning. It hasn’t been too interesting yet. Listen, Sheriff Scully, could you spell me? I’ve had to pee about an hour. Sorry, ma’am. Could you?”
“You bet, Jim. Go on ahead.”
The patrolman left Bodge, Mike, and me alone. I looked at the monitor. The man in the bed, Jason — Tom — had lost thirty pounds. He was frail-looking, drawn, weakened. I wasn’t fooled by this; I knew he was dangerous, powerful. I knew he would recover and become his tenacious self again.
“There he is,” Mike said. “There the fucker is.”
I saw a dial and turned it, recognizing Brad’s voice. He held a brown grocery sack.
“You sure you don’t want to talk about it? I’ll get you anything you want first. You want something? Maybe a drink of water? Pain pill? Urinal?” There was no response. Brad went on. “Maybe you could tell me about this. You know what this is?”
Mike and I watched, exchanged glances. I was hearing this with my own ears. Mike pulled on my arm. “Jack, we don’t want to be hearing this shit. Let’s leave. Huh?”
“Want me to show it to you? What is it? You know what this is?”
He held an old, dirty purse. I felt my heart lurch. Devalian said nothing.
“What is it?” Krump asked. No comment from the bed. “You don’t want to talk about it? I can get rid of it?” Nothing. “Maybe I’ll burn it, then.” Nothing. “Okay. It isn’t really evidence, so no big deal if it disappears. I’m gonna burn it.” He turned as if to leave the room. “Bye, then.”
“A purse,” came a low, weary voice. It didn’t sound like him at first. I looked at the monitor, knew it was him, but his voice was far away, tired and whipped. “It’s a purse.”
“Whose purse?”
There was a long pause. “My mother’s purse.”
“Did you kill her?”
“He killed her.”
“Who?”
“I don’t want to talk.”
“Who killed your mother, Jason?”
“My father, that’s who. He didn’t murder her. He just killed her. He punched her and choked her to death. He did that a lot... And that time she died.”
“Did you see him?”
“I always saw him. I was there. I was always there.”
“Why did he beat her? Why did he kill her?”
“Because she was weak. Because she was useless.”
“Did he beat you, too?”
The sound of laughter came out of him, a low, rumbling chuckle. He looked near death. He never moved his head. Sound came out of him, but he didn’t move at all. “Yeah, he beat me, I guess you could say.”
“With his fists?”
“Oh, sure, and everything. And his dick. And his mouth, and sticks and stones and belts. Leave me alone. I’m tired.”
The voice I heard was beaten. Pitiful and wasted. Maybe he had given up. I just wouldn’t believe it.
“How old were you when your father killed your mother?”
“I dunno. Five.”
“And who buried her?”
“He did. With her purse and her clothes. She’s right there on the farm.”
“But you have the purse.”
“I got it out. I dug her up and got out the purse after I heard what he said to the police. He said, ‘She run off, that’s all she did. Run off with some hand. She took her clothes and her purse and left the boy.’”
“Why did you dig up the purse?”
“I don’t know. To have it. To give it to the police so they’d know she didn’t run off, she got killed. By him.”
“You wanted him to be caught?” No response came. “You wanted him to be punished for killing your mother?” Still no response. “Did your father molest you? Sexually molest you when you were a boy?”
There was the sound of a snarl. “Did he fuck me when I was two? Three? Four?” he angrily replied. “Yeah.”
“And when your mother was gone, there was no one to protect you?”
“She didn’t protect me,” he said. “She held me for him.”
Mike gave a sharp tug on my arm. I turned my head and looked into his eyes. “They were mostly young mothers, Mike. Even me. I’d had a child. He killed the mothers... I bet he killed the mothers of little boys. Oh, God.”
“Come on, let’s get out of here.”
I turned back to the monitor. “Your mother participated in your father’s sexual abuse?”
“Oh, fuck you,” he said. “Who the hell cares? So what?”
“And you hate women? You brutalize women?”
“If only she’d liked me.”
“Your mother?”
“No, man. Jackie. Jackie Sheppard.”
“If only Jackie had liked you?”
No response. I was mesmerized. I felt Mike tug at my arm, but it was ridiculous to think I’d walk away while I was being discussed. He must have known that, because he didn’t try again.
“Why did you want Jackie to like you?”
Again no response.
“You liked her?”
“Sure. Sure I did.”
“You wanted to settle down? You wanted her to like you so you could settle down?”
He started to laugh. It was almost a giggle. “I just wanted her to like me. That’s all.”
“And if she’d liked you?”
N
o response.
“If she’d liked you, you would have settled down, started a new kind of life?”
I saw his head come up. His piercing eyes bore through Brad Krump. “You cops are such idiots,” he said. “If she’d liked me, she’d be dead now.”
“So, you only kill the women who like you?” Krump said, unruffled. Because my name had been mentioned, I had momentarily forgotten this was an interrogation. I was struck numb; Krump went on trying to get the facts.
“That it? You only kill the women who like you?”
“I ain’t talking. Go home, Krump. I’m tired.”
Mike was right; that was all we could take. I turned away from the monitor and walked out of the room, toward the locked ward doors. I stood there and waited while Bodge caught up and the officer on our side used his key to let us out.
I believed I understood. It was incomprehensible to me that a baby, a two-year-old boy — or younger if we could know the facts — could be terrorized this way. I found it unimaginable. But I’d read of such things. I knew it was so.
After we left the hospital, we went to the CHP headquarters, where Bodge and Mike wanted to ask a few questions about the case. Mike wanted me to talk to a professional who had been studying the Devalian case since his arrest. I let a psychologist for the state, probably a man like Tom Lawler, explain what he understood about Jason Devalian’s mind.
This was what built him: A mother who held him for his father to rape. Years of hideous abuse and psychological terror. He kept their purses as souvenirs. Or maybe he did it to prove to himself that his victims went with him willingly.
Killing was Jason Devalian’s job. He handled it like full-time work. He stole a little money now and then, but not because he needed it. Stalking and killing were a big operation, the way he did them. He wasn’t much of a carpenter; he didn’t take difficult jobs. He was more a handyman, Mr. Fix-it type. He’d get real friendly with the housewives, seduce them, give them secrets to keep, take them away. The women all had their clothes on; they never had a purse or wallet. The cooperation of his victims was important to him. He isolated them from their other friends and lured them into an intense, secret, sexually volatile liaison; they always went with him. The last bit of forensic detail was the presence of semen in the corpses. They had all probably had intercourse with Devalian, a man who was typically impotent. The psychologist suggested postmortem rape could explain the pattern. Devalian’s was a psychosexual dysfunction that brought him ultimate relief through murder.
He liked to challenge his body, his mind, his capacity for pain, his proximity to danger. He liked the lies, the edge, the manipulation, and the win. He was not capable of normal social relationships or normal sexual relationships. The only thing that had kept me alive was the fact that I didn’t like him. He’d have had to kidnap me, but his high wasn’t as good unless he had a believer. The cooperation and submission of his victims was terribly important.
“He’s crazy,” I said to the psychologist.
“I think so.”
“He could get the insanity deal again, couldn’t he?”
“I don’t think so. Do I think he must be insane? Yes. Can he help it? Maybe not. Does he know what he’s doing? Every second. He is not acting out of psychosis. He fully comprehends his actions, his behavior. He knows it’s wrong and punishable, which is why he was so careful to keep from getting caught. He is driven by something else. An evil created in him. That doesn’t meet the definition of mental illness or insanity within the law. He will probably get the death penalty.”
I wondered what it would take to kill him.
Further details regarding the commission of Devalian’s crimes will keep coming as the interrogation and investigation progress. My questions are all answered. My clothes are packed and my house is full of boxes, which the moving van will pick up tomorrow. Mike and I will drive my car to Los Angeles. I said good-bye to the Danias; I will have dinner with Sue and Bodge, then drive out to Roberta’s for the night.
This ordeal caused Roberta to make changes of her own. She decided it was time to close up her practice for good. She doesn’t need the money or the work. She’s sixty and widowed and hasn’t seen much of the world yet. She’ll travel, she says, keeping her ranch as a base and making L.A. a frequent stop. She offered me the practice. I was touched by her generosity, but I’m through with small-town life.
I’m going to visit an old aunt in Connecticut — haven’t seen her in twenty years or so. I’m going to visit a college friend in Baltimore. Mrs. Wright, the cranky old next-door neighbor, never did talk to me, but I found a bunch of flowers from her garden on my doorstep with a little note. It said, “What a brave girl.” I’m going to cherish that commendation, visit friends, take my time, get my life back. Devalian had possession of me for long enough, though he doesn’t know it — never knew it.
I’m going to see if I can learn to sleep. And if I sleep again, I’m going back into family law, domestic law. Maybe my old firm will want me back. I’m going to do what I can to get closer to domestic crisis and child abuse. I’m going to see if I can cause any legal intervention where there’s violence and abuse — and maybe, just maybe, I can prevent the building of just one psychopath.
But that’s if I can sleep again someday.
If.
Be sure to check out Robyn Carr’s other classics
Chelynne
The Bellerose Bargain
The Braeswood Tapestry
The Blue Falcon
The Troubadour’s Romance
The Everlasting Covenant
By Right of Arms
Woman’s Own
Rogue’s Lady
Tempted
Robyn Carr is a RITA Award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of fifty novels, including the critically acclaimed Virgin River series. Her new series, Thunder Point, made its debut as a #1 NYT bestseller in March 2013. Robyn and her husband live in Las Vegas, Nevada. You can visit Robyn Carr's website at www.RobynCarr.com or follow her on Twitter at @RCarrWriter.