Hunting Annabelle, page 19
I go into a haze and come a little bit out of it when the lights get turned on. A set of cops in black uniforms is standing over me, and then a set of paramedics is standing over me, and then I’m floating off into an ambulance. I was wrong. It wasn’t Rob. I don’t know where Annabelle is, and now I probably never will.
Chapter Nineteen
Being arrested, booked and charged with a crime is slightly different in Texas. Well, also, I’m injured, so there’s less annoyance on the front end. They handle most of the paperwork while I’m being patched up at the hospital. It takes them a few hours to determine that I am pretty much fine, just bruised. None of the nurses seem to give a shit that there’s a cop waiting for me to be treated. It’s just a breaking-and-entering case, and it’s noticeable how differently I’m treated by the cops compared to the last time I was arrested. They seem to think it’s kind of funny, a weird-looking Asian kid breaking into a good old Texas boy’s house and getting a proper ass-whupping.
As I sit on the examination table, hands handcuffed behind me, I stare at the little glass-and-mesh window in the puke-green door and remember the door in the asylum. I remember the drugged apathy that had made time stop passing and, for the first time, I miss it with every cell in my body. I miss it so much that it literally hurts. I search my body for some comforting feeling of medicine, but I can’t find it. I’m completely alone.
Eventually I’m shipped to the police station. I’m brought in through a side entrance and my vitals are recorded by bored-looking desk cops. I’m measured and fingerprinted and given something to hold while my photograph is taken. The cops who brought me in tell the other cops why I’m here and they all have a good laugh. I say nothing. When they ask me questions, I tell them I want my lawyer. I know the drill. Phones ring around us, shrill and loud against the ever-present clickety-clack of typewriters.
I don’t like to look at the cops when I’m being handled and questioned. It makes me remember those two cops in the cruiser, that first night I was arrested at the scene of the crime.
When they’re done with my identification, have taken my clothes and my wallet, and have searched all of my orifices for whatever I could be smuggling in, I’m allowed to make a call from a designated phone that allows me to call any number in the area. I’m warned that I only get one call from this phone; after this, I’m going to have to use the pay phone in the holding cell to make collect calls. I stand there in my baggy scrubs, staring at the beige phone in front of me. The cop stands with his hand on the receiver, ready to dial whatever number I give him.
I could page my mom, but it will take hours for her to call back.
I have no one else.
Is this really my life? I stand there staring at the phone with no one to call, not a single person. I did have a few friends growing up, other artsy, nerdy kids. I guess I always figured that things would get better when I got older. I’d get better at keeping friends. I’d grow out of whatever was wrong with me.
Yet here I am.
The cop clears his throat. “You gonna give me a number?”
Finally I have him dial Dr. Shandra’s office line. I leave a number with her emergency answering service. I ask them to have Dr. Shandra page my mom since I’m not able to get an incoming call here. I tell them where I am and the lady taking the message exhibits no surprise.
I follow the cop into the cell where I am supposed to wait. It’s much better than the crowded holding area. It looks like I’ll be sharing with only a couple of people, both of them old and homeless-looking, both of them cozily asleep on the benches. I find a spot on the concrete floor against the wall and settle down to wait. I lean my head back and stare up at the fluorescent lights.
The homeless guy nearest me snorts and jolts himself awake, rising to a sitting position that seems to shock him. He looks wildly around the cell. His eyes land on me, on the floor. He’s a gray-haired white man with red-rimmed eyes and crinkly, sunbaked skin. I make eye contact with him but am unable to smile. My arms are locked around my knees, hands wound together.
He rubs his hands over his forehead. “They serve dinner yet?” he asks in a thick Southern accent.
I shake my head.
“Good.” He clears his throat, which triggers a coughing fit from deep inside his lungs. He covers his mouth with a wobbly, ashen hand.
“You should get that cough looked at,” I say.
He waves a hand at me in a gesture of mirth and coughs into his other fist. “I’ll get right on it,” he laughs as his coughing fit subsides.
We sit in silence. He gets comfortable on the bench again, head cradled in his arms. He stares at the ceiling like an outdoorsman admiring the stars. I lean my head back and look up at the ceiling with him. I follow the pattern of cracks and shadows from one end to the other, allowing myself to be soothed by the simple act of observing. He doesn’t smell great, but I suppose I probably don’t, either.
“What you in for?” he asks after a little while. “You get into a fight?”
I nod my head, rubbing it on the rough wall behind me. “It’s not just that. They think I killed someone. A girl.”
After a pause, he says, “Your old lady?”
“Kind of.”
He doesn’t respond. I don’t blame him.
“I’m not guilty,” I say, a shade too loud. “I’m not some crazy psycho.”
He looks doubtful. Do I sound defensive? I didn’t do anything to Annabelle—of course not. I loved her. Love her. I would never. I remember the cops in the interrogation room that first night, when they’d grilled me about the evening, looking for a way to make it my fault, looking for a hole in my story that would prove I’d been the one to abduct her.
That memory makes my stomach uneasy. It’s one little detail, something I’ve been avoiding and that I wish wasn’t popping into my mind right now.
I lost time between when Annabelle was taken and when I called the cops. What happened to that missing forty-five minutes? I don’t remember calling the police at all. I remember being confused. Maybe I was confused about more things than I’d been willing to admit. Maybe I’m crazier than I want to believe.
No. I’m fucked up in the head, but I’m not capable of killing someone and forgetting about it altogether.
In this moment, everything comes into focus: Elise’s dead face, wide brown eyes staring, horror welling up inside my chest; the fancy San Francisco lawyer’s suggestion of schizophrenia and his search for the perfect psychiatrist to diagnose me; my mom watching all this happen, eyes shrouded; and finally my release into the world and the knowledge that it was wrong, that I’d successfully manipulated the system and that I did not deserve my freedom. I picture myself at Four Corners, in my self-imposed institutionalization, waiting out the sentence I knew I’d earned.
Annabelle is dead. I know it. They’ll eventually find her, and I’ll be convicted of the crime. Perhaps I am finally going to get exactly what I deserve. I can’t deny the justice. Maybe this is God correcting a mistake or fate finally making good.
* * *
Jail is like a waterslide. I don’t have to do anything once I’ve done the work of getting on. The ground drops out from underneath me and all that’s left is for me to fold my arms across my chest and wait to hit the ground.
This waterslide ride consists of half sleep, a couple of sandwiches served at weird hours, peeing in a public toilet, smelling the homeless guys’ shits when they use the toilet, and eventually facing my stone-faced mother, her lawyer, Steve Ross, an aging redheaded man who wears cowboy boots with his suit, and a judge who releases me on bail.
The ride takes me in front of Detectives Benton and Ridgeway, who meet us at the police station so the lawyer can sign paperwork. In the interrogation room where we’re crowded around a table full of forms, Ridgeway looks at me and says, “Thanks for getting yourself in here to be fingerprinted. You saved me the trouble of bringing you down.”
I stare at her stupidly.
“We have prints collected from your home, but of course we need the official set for comparison,” she explains.
My lawyer looks up and scans her face.
She continues. “We found some interesting prints in Annabelle’s apartment. Anything you might know about, Sean?”
I look back and forth between her and my lawyer. To him, I say, “I don’t understand. They already knew I went to Annabelle’s apartment. I wanted to talk to Jenny, her roommate. I spoke to Ridgeway on the phone from there.”
He looks at the detectives. “What—” he begins, but Ridgeway interrupts him.
“We found unidentified prints on unexpected surfaces,” she explains. “We wonder if they might be your client’s.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Such as...?”
“Such as the knives in the kitchen.”
I try to keep my face still while inside my guts are tumbling down onto the linoleum.
Ridgeway leans forward onto the scratched table, her wrists stretching the buttoned sleeves of her blue shirt. She folds her hands together in front of her and asks, “Are you a serial killer, Sean? Are there more bodies that no one’s ever found? Are things about to get really, really interesting?”
“No,” I whisper.
“We’re looking into everyone who’s gone missing since you moved to Austin, looking into which ones might have visited Four Corners, your little hunting ground.”
Mute, I shake my head at her in wordless horror.
“So, I’ve been researching serial killers,” Ridgeway continues, almost cheerfully. “You know, the last ten or fifteen years have been very active years for serial killers. I was surprised by how many different stories I found. Weren’t you?” she asks Benton lightly, who nods in the affirmative, eyes twinkling. “The seventies in particular,” she goes on. “There was the Freeway Phantom in the DC area. Killed six young women. There’s the Connecticut River Valley killer—he’s still at large. You know where there have been some very interesting serial killers, Sean? California.”
I look to the lawyer for help. He’s watching her with a frown but doesn’t protest.
“The Doodler. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you, Sean? He was active in San Francisco in ’74 and ’75. You’d have been, what, thirteen? A formative time in your life. Do you know what he did? He sketched his victims before he killed them.”
I’ve heard of The Doodler. Everyone in San Francisco has; he’s famous for killing gay guys in the Castro. I don’t know what this has to do with me until she says, “Doesn’t that remind you of yourself a little bit? You and your sketches of all the folks who come through Four Corners? It makes me wonder if most of those sketches are just decoys to keep us from looking at the real ones, the ones of your victims. Like the coffee shop girl. Rebecca.”
“I never did anything to Rebecca,” I protest.
“We know. We got in touch with her. She quit her job and works at a restaurant across town now. Do you know why?”
“No, I never spoke with her, like I told you.”
“Because of you. You stalked her, followed her, sat through her entire shift, drawing picture after picture of her while she worked. Her manager asked you to stop, but then you stood at the window outside and drew her picture from there.”
I don’t know what to say. I look down at my hands, ashamed. “I didn’t mean to creep her out,” I whisper. “I didn’t realize she even knew I was there.”
The lawyer’s hand comes up in a sharp motion for me to be quiet. “This is all very interesting,” he says calmly. “But can you come to the point? My client is tired and would like to go home, and so far I’m not hearing anything that should keep us here.”
She goes on as though he hadn’t interrupted. “There was the Zodiac Killer a little earlier. Much more famous; everyone in the country knew about him. You remember him, don’t you, Mr. Ross? He was active in Northern California as well. You know what I find interesting about the Zodiac Killer?” She reaches under the stack of papers on the table and extracts a large, flat Ziploc bag. It contains the note I’d received from the kidnapper, the one that reads, THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU LEAVE THE FISH IN THE CARE OF THE CAT. As I stare at the writing through the Austin PD imprint on the bag, Ridgeway’s voice drops lower. “The Zodiac Killer sent letters to the police. He liked to send little puzzles. Cryptograms. He was egotistical. He liked to play games. Does that sound familiar at all?”
I shake my head.
“There’s something unique about this expression, the fish in the care of the cat. That’s strange. I haven’t ever heard that before. I’ve heard an expression about a fox guarding a henhouse, but not a cat with a fish. That was interesting to me, and it occurred to me that it might be a similar analogy in another language. Does that make sense?”
Steve Ross stares at me like I have some explaining to do. “I really have no idea what she’s talking about,” I say.
“I bet your mother knows,” Ridgeway says. “I bet she’s known the whole time.”
“Known what?” I plead.
She says it to me, but she’s looking at my mom. “It’s a Korean proverb.” She flips the bag over. A line of Korean characters and a corresponding English translation are printed neatly on an index card taped to the reverse side of the plastic bag.
고양이에게 생선을 맡기다
Leave the fish in the care of the cat
“It’s like leaving the fish in the care of the cat. Same idea as leaving the fox to guard the henhouse.”
“I don’t know any Korean proverbs,” I protest. “I don’t speak Korean. I couldn’t read that if I tried.” I jab a finger toward the Korean letters.
“You knew,” Ridgeway says to my mom, ignoring me.
My mom shakes her head. Her lips are tight.
Ridgeway stares at my mother for a long moment. A muscle in my mother’s jaw twitches visibly through the porcelain skin. At last, Ridgeway says, “You have to stop protecting him. Do you want to be responsible for this?” She indicates the file in front of her, as though Annabelle’s death is contained neatly within.
My arms explode into prickling, like someone’s electrocuting me with a thousand tiny needles. I shudder and rub at them furiously, and then the nausea hits me in a wave. I clap a hand to my mouth and leap to my feet. I cast a panicked glance around and race to a trash can in the corner, where I vomit explosively, almost missing the can in my hurry. I pant and gasp, spitting bile, trying to keep my hair out of the way.
“What’s wrong with him?” Ridgeway asks behind me. My mom hurries to my side, where she leans forward to study me with a diagnostic frown. She touches my neck lightly, pulls away a fingerful of sweat.
“He’s experiencing withdrawals from his antipsychotics,” she says at last, straightening to a standing position. “We’ll get him back on his medication schedule at home.”
“We’re done here anyway,” the lawyer says. “Until you charge my client with a crime, your speculations about serial killers from ten years ago and a possible Korean reference to a cat are just that: speculations.”
The ride is sliding me away from here, out of this horrible room where I’m an insect under a magnifying glass and back out into the hot, stagnant Texas air.
The ride takes me into my mom’s air-conditioned Audi, where I sit smelling the leather seats and my own body odor. I look out the window at the freeway speeding by, my bruised cheek and ribs aching and burning. I am too ashamed to break my mom’s horrified silence. Ridgeway’s words seem to echo between us. “Are you a serial killer, Sean?”
My mom breaks the silence for me. She asks, “Have you been taking your meds?”
I look at her, surprised. “In jail? How could I?”
“No, at home. Before you were arrested.”
“Of course.”
“You wouldn’t be having these symptoms after only a day and a half off your meds,” she says.
I blink at her. “You think I’m lying? You think I’ve been, what, flushing my meds? Why would I do that? I’ve always taken my meds.”
She keeps her eyes on the windshield. I can feel her disbelief.
“I have no reason to lie. I’m a grown man. I can take them or not if I want.”
Nothing.
I heave a frustrated sigh and look out the windshield. The day is muggy. It looks like rain. “I’ve been feeling like shit all week, for the record,” I tell her. “Not that it matters. I think I have a stomach bug or something.”
Silence.
The ride takes me back home to a house that has been professionally reorganized. It slides me up to my room, which has been cleaned, as well. It deposits me onto my bed, on the exact spot where Annabelle sat, and that’s where I’m left to crumple into a heap, my face pressed into my arms, my hands clutching the back of my sweaty T-shirt. The thing that eventually gets me up is my stench. In the hot shower, my skin starts prickling again, and I press my hands to my face, letting the hot water run down them into my eyes like tears. I want to cry, but the tears won’t come. I’m hollowed out and numb, like I’ve been emptied by the emptiness around me.
When I go back downstairs, my mom is on the phone, leaning against the kitchen wall and wrapping the cord around her fingers. She’s talking in quiet, urgent Korean. When she spots me, her eyes sharpen and she says a few last things, then hang up. She moves to the dining table, where she sits behind a mountain of paperwork and settles her reading glasses on her nose. I search the fridge and come up with a carton of milk. I pour myself a glass and sip it cautiously.
