Cody McFadyen - Abandoned

“Kirby?” I call out.

“In the living room.”

“Is that music?” Tommy asks.

I strain an ear. “Classical. Beethoven, I believe.”

We move through the entryway and sitting room and arrive in the living room. It’s next to the kitchen, one broad, open space that builders are calling the “great-room concept.” I don’t like it. I like my rooms with walls. The living room has a nice couch, a midsize flat-screen TV, and a coffee table. Floor lamps light the space. The curtains on all the windows are drawn, and the blinds are closed on the sliding-glass door that leads into the backyard.

Dali sits in one of the kitchen chairs, cuffed at hands and feet, eyes cool.

“Hello, Mercy Lane,” I say. “Hello, number 35,” she replies.

I suspected it, and then the name on the house’s title confirmed it, but it still surprises me in the flesh: Dali is a woman. That thing I’d seen in my cell, the thing I’d kept to myself, had been a smooth neck, sans Adam’s apple. Eric Kellerman’s corpse, on the other hand, had a prominent one.

“How’d you know?” she asks me.

I don’t answer right away. I take time to study the person who brought me to this shadow land, a place where murder is both acceptable and desired. She’s a short woman, with a beautiful, aquiline face. She keeps her brunette hair cropped close, and it works for her. Her eyes are a shocking blue. She’s wearing blue jeans and a thin pullover shirt. She looks stunning and innocuous, like a cobra with its hood down.

“That was some plan,” I say. “How long have you had that escape hatch in place?”

Dali had been pragmatic in all things. This included planning for the possibility that we might someday find her. She’d decided to have a patsy, ready-made and waiting, and she’d sown the necessary seeds years ago. She put Eric Kellerman’s fingerprints on the body bags. She faked the symphorophilia fetish, choosing it because it was so unique. If anyone closed in, it would be Eric Kellerman’s corpse they’d find, along with his collection of car-crash memorabilia and his fingerprints.

Dali would be officially dead, and Mercy Lane would be safe forever. I’d considered the possibility that they were working together but had dismissed it; Dali was a solitary machine.

She shrugs. “The last piece fell in place eight or nine years ago. Eric. But I’d been laying the groundwork for a long time.”

“The car accidents.”

“Yes.”

I vocalize what I’ve surmised, not so much for confirmation but because I want to show her that, yes, I figured it out, you weren’t smarter than me, I win in the end. I want to wave it in front of her face and taunt her with it.

“So if we caught on to you—or someone else did—you could suicide your patsy and leave incontrovertible evidence behind to link him to the crimes: the videos and photos of the car wrecks. Too unusual, too distinct, to be any kind of coincidence. The fingerprints left on the body bags would serve as confirmation. Is that right?”

“Essentially. It was a good plan. Where did I go wrong?”

“You grabbed me.”

She shakes her head. It’s not assertive, just dismissive. “That’s posturing, not logic. You were really no different, in terms of risk, than any other unit.”

Unit. My finger twitches on the trigger guard at her use of the word.

“Fine. Let’s just say that I’m more observant than most people. I saw something germane, and then you made the really big mistake of letting me go.”

“What did you see?”

There’s an edge to her voice, to the question. It’s not driven by idle curiosity. She wants to know where she went wrong. Where did her pragmatism fail to serve her?

“Something. I saw something.” I smile, and I know it’s a cruel smile, even worse than the one I gave to Douglas Hollister.

Mercy scowls. “You’re not going to tell me.”

“No.”

“Childish.”

“But satisfying.”

“So? What’s the plan, then? Am I under arrest?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Her face clears. “Ah, I see. You’re going to kill me.” She nods her approval. “That’s smart. Practical.”

“How’d you get Eric Kellerman to pull the trigger on himself?” I ask.

“I kidnapped Eric and a young woman almost nine years ago. I convinced him that the young woman was his illegitimate daughter. Eric was an orphan, so this had a particular significance to him. I tortured them both for years to demonstrate to Eric what I was capable of.

“A few years ago I told Eric I’d moved his ‘daughter’ to another facility. I gave him the choice: pull the trigger when the time came and I’d set her free, fail to do so and I’d keep her in darkness ’til she was old and gray.” She shrugs. “He made his choice, as planned.”

“And did you? Let her go?”

“Of course not. I killed her almost two years ago.”

“Why?”

Mercy looks puzzled. The question, it seems, is a stupid one. “Eric had been suitably prepared. I had more than one hundred hours of recorded video available, on the off chance he demanded visual proof she was still alive. The woman was using up space, water, food, and electricity. I didn’t need her anymore.”

I feel Tommy stir next to me. He is as disturbed by this answer as I am.

“Why, Dali? Why did you do this?”

Mercy; Dali—I move back and forth between the names. She is both of them but neither.

“For the money, number 35, of course. My father had a daughter, but he raised me as a son. He taught me three basic lessons: Joy is everything that comes after survival. Survival is based on money. There is no soul; we’re all just meat. He didn’t only say these things to me, he proved them.” She pauses. “For example, he took the woman meat of me and turned me into a man.”

I frown, taking in the beautiful face. “You look pretty female to me.”

“That’s my cover, number 35. The mask I wear in the outside world. Would you like to see the real me?”

“Yes.”

The eyes go flat. The face changes subtly, becoming more brutal. The shoulders drop, and a faint aura of menace surrounds her. “Go ahead,” she says, speaking to Kirby but looking at me. Her voice has changed, lowered, deepened, becoming the voice I’d heard outside the trunk. “Go ahead and check my breasts.”

“Excuse me?” Kirby asks.

“Feel my breasts.”

Kirby raises an eyebrow at me. “Go ahead,” I say.

“If you insist.” She winks. “I prefer the men, but I’ve been known to like the ladies too.” She reaches down without hesitation and squeezes Dali’s right breast with her left hand. She frowns. “That doesn’t feel right.” She reaches inside Dali’s shirt. I watch as her hand fumbles.

Distaste passes over her face. Her hand comes out clutching something breast-sized and rubbery. “Silicone,” she says. “Nothing else.”

“Do you see?” Mercy Lane rasps. “Just meat to be molded. Dad cut away my breasts when they’d finished growing. He said they’d make me weak, that it was too hard for a woman to survive in this world.” She smiles. “He made me strong.”

I search for pity, but even now all I see is Leo. My desire to pull the trigger has been transformed into lassitude. The injured finger throbs.

“Time to die, Mercy,” I say.

She shrugs. “Meat to meat. I was going to die sooner or later. We all go back to the dirt.”

I screw on the silencer and walk over so that I am facing the creature in the chair, this breastless woman with the man’s voice and the faded, empty blue eyes. I raise the gun and point it at her forehead.

A last question.

“Why did you change such a successful MO? The notes telling us you existed, letting Heather go without a lobotomy, releasing me: Why’d you do those things, Mercy? They made no sense.”