Chapter 12
1
The drive from Iowa City to Davenport is a short trip on I-80. Holly, Kate, and Corrie are at the Country Inn men have sub-basements.
“That’s right. Believe the woman, respect the woman, and don’t take any shit from people who don’t. Thank you, Davenport, you’ve been so great! Goodnight!”
But they won’t let her go until she’s come out for three bows. Standing O time. Only the boo-birds refuse to get on their feet. Not so many as in Iowa City, Holly observes, and sitting there in their blue shirts, they look like sulky children. She reminds herself that even children can be dangerous, and that leads her back to what she was thinking when she glanced at that screen shot, expecting nothing and getting a lot. Maybe everything. She needs to talk to Izzy, but first she has to take care of her women.
Later on she will think, Thank God for the chair. If not for that, Kate could have ended up in Ira Davenport Hospital. Or dead .
4
The RiverCenter stage door is on Third Street, and so Holly has arranged for them to go out a different way, onto Pershing Avenue, where a car and driver provided by Next Page Books will be waiting to whisk them back to the hotel. After Iowa City, Holly expects no problem with their exit (what’s called “exfiltration” in Essentials for Bodyguards ), but that turns out to be far too optimistic.
Later, in Madison, Corrie Anderson will fill Holly in on what she’s learned about Kate’s audiences on this tour, much of it from Kate herself. “There are three main after-show groups,” she’ll say. “There are Woman Power fans who just want to wave and maybe get a picture of Kate leaving the building. There are autograph seekers, who can be a little pushier. Then there are the eBayers.”
“The what?”
“Collectors. Brokers. Buy-sell-and-trade guys. They’re rabid and they’re pushy. It’s only partly about money. It’s also about the thrill of the hunt. They want first editions signed, or limited editions—Kate did a couple of those. They want posters, eight-by-ten glossies, even one-sheets from the Showtime Women Now doc she participated in. They have stuff you wouldn’t believe. One woman wanted Kate to sign a pair of panties . They sell their goods on eBay or dedicated collectors’ sites like Kate 4Eva. The true fanatics are as persistent as cockroaches and just as hard to get rid of.”
Holly finds out for herself when they emerge on Pershing. This exfiltration point was supposed to be a dead secret, but there’s a crowd of seventy-five or a hundred people waiting for them. They aren’t taking pix with their phones; they’re waving books, magazines, posters, and other paraphernalia—one has a gay pride rainbow flag—all of them calling things like Kate! For my mother, Kate, she couldn’t come! Kate, I came all the way from Fort Collins! Kate, please! Please! I’ve been a fan since 2004! How they knew about Holly’s exit strategy is a thing she never finds out, but after being fooled the first time—possibly just by dumb luck—they somehow do.
A RiverCenter usher is sitting in a folding chair and waiting for Kate to come out. When the crowd surges forward, he gets up, spreads his arms, and does his best to hold them back… which is like King Canute trying to hold back the tide. Beyond the waving, yelling eBayers, their driver—a young woman who looks like a college student—watches with a face that says, I have no fucking idea what I’m supposed to do now .
Holly’s phone is on her belt, still set to mute. She feels it vibrate, looks down, sees JEROME in the window. She has no time to consider this, let alone answer, because just then a howl of rage cuts through the persistent babble.
“YOUUUU BIIIIITCH!”
A very large man who looks like a gone-to-seed WWE wrestler bulls his way through the crowd. He’s wearing khaki pants and a dirty white tee-shirt. His hair is shaved down to a shadow. His arms are inked and his face is red with fury. He’s swinging a baseball bat. The usher steps in front of him and the man ( the Hulk , Holly thinks, the Incredible Hulk ) sends him flying into the street with one push.
“YOUUUUU FUUUUCKING BIIITCH!”
Kate freezes, staring with wide, amazed eyes as the Incredible Hulk raises his bat. Corrie lifts one hand in a stop gesture that will work on this man no more than a pitcher of water would work on a forest fire.
Holly doesn’t think, simply kicks the usher’s chair. It skitters across the sidewalk. The Incredible Hulk trips over it and faceplants on the concrete. Blood leaps from his nose and lips. The eBayers are screaming and backing away, some dropping their precious mementos, phones, and Sharpies.
The Hulk rolls over. His lower face is painted with blood. He points at Kate like an explorer pointing out an extraordinary landmark. “YOUUU! MY WIFE LEFT ME BECAUSE OF YOUUUU!”
He’s struggling to get up. Somewhere a police siren has begun to whoop. Holly says to Kate, “Get in the car.”
Kate goes without question or hesitation, hauling her stunned assistant by one arm. The Hulk has made it to his knees, looking after them. Holly dips into her bag, and when the Hulk turns back to her, she hits him with a faceful of pepper spray.
The crowd draws even further back, as if Holly were radioactive, and she realizes she’s still holding the spray can out in front of her. To the stunned bookstore girl, she says, “Take the women to the hotel. Don’t wait for me. I’ll have to talk to the police.”
5
Her conversation with the cops doesn’t take long. The Incredible Hulk (quite drunk and now more like a sobbing, three-hundred-pound child) is taken away to be booked on an assault charge, and Holly is back at the Country Inn doesn’t even need to close her eyes. She sees it, along with every name: BOB, FRANK M., KENNY D., CATHY 2-T. And brIGGS. Only brIGGS is different. Not much, just enough.
“Can you look at the picture of Reverend Rafferty’s calendar? Do you have it?”
“Just a sec, I left my iPad in the kitchen.”
Holly has never been in Izzy’s apartment—at least not yet—but she imagines a narrow, easy-care kitchen and Izzy’s purse on the counter. Maybe next to an empty wine glass. She imagines Izzy herself in flappy and comfy cotton pajamas.
“Okay, I’ve got the calendar page. What about it?”
“Let’s start with Reverend Rafferty. I think he was nearsighted, but I think he was also vain. That’s more a guess than a deduction, but did you find glasses?”
“There was a pair in his bedside table, yes. Probably for reading.”
“Look at his appointments for May. Are you looking?”
“Yes. Get to it, please. ”
Holly won’t be hurried, because she’s still explaining it to herself. “The names are all in caps, and slightly spread out.” In her mind she sees it: not FRANK M. or CATHY 2-T, but F R A N K M. and C A T H Y 2 - T. “He could do that, because the boxes for days of the month are quite big.”
“Yes. Seeing it.”
“But brIGGS is different. More squeezed together. Not a lot, but it’s there. Jerome saw it, he just didn’t understand what it meant. Are you looking? Do you see?”
“I guess… yeah, you’re right.”
“That’s because Reverend Rafferty didn’t make a B . He made a T . It was his killer who turned it into a B . Then, at the end of the name, he added a GS . He tried to make them look the same as Rafferty’s capital letters and did a good job because capital letters are much easier to forge than cursive. What gives it away—”
“The last two letters are tighter,” Izzy says. “Not much, but a little. And… yeah, that B could have started life as a T .”
“It was never Briggs,” Holly says. “Rafferty’s appointment was with someone named Trig.” Self-doubt won’t be entirely denied. “I think.”
“Yes! Fuck, yes ! He must have used the pen that was next to the appointment book on the counter, because the ink matches perfectly.”
“And he didn’t just scratch out his name, because he thought the police lab might have some voodoo technique that could read it through the scratch-out.” Holly considers. “He should have just taken the whole appointment book. He was too smart for his own good. And maybe paranoid. It was a hurry-up job, after all.”
“The Bill Wilson name might also have been too smart for his own good,” Izzy says. “You need to go back to your Program friend and ask if he’s gone to AA or NA meetings with someone who calls himself Trig.”
“Maybe I don’t have to, and neither do you. I think Trig is Alan Duffrey’s lawyer. Russell Grinsted.”
“Not following. Help me out here.”
“Do you have a pad and pen handy?”
“Sure, on the fridge. For shopping lists.”
“Write down his last name. If you take out the E , the N , the S , and the D , what does that leave?”
“ G, R, I, T . Grit?”
“Rearrange them, like you’re playing Wordle.”
“Wordle? I don’t know what—”
“Never mind, just do it.”
A pause while Izzy scribbles on her pad. Then: “Ah, fuck. Trig is buried in Grinsted. Isn’t it? Tom was right about you, Holly. That’s some real Agatha Christie shit right there.”
It really is Agatha Christie shit, Holly thinks. It would work in a book as the big reveal in the last chapter, but does it work in real life? The essential unbelievability of the idea nags at her, it feels like a paper boat caught on a twig, but at the same time it’s just so fracking perfect . And if Grinsted has decided he’s some kind of criminal mastermind, like in a Batman movie… someone too smart for his own good…
“At the very least, you need to question Grinsted again,” Holly says.
“No shit, and go at him hard,” Izzy says. “First thing tomorrow. Early. But everyone involved thought he gave Duffrey’s defense his best. How sure are you?”
“Not enough,” Holly says fretfully. “I want to believe it, because it’s so elegant, but it still feels shaky to me.”
“Too perfect?”
“Yes.” And Holly has come to believe that perfection will always be out of her reach. “I’m almost positive about the Trig part, though. He changed it to Briggs. I’ll talk to my Program friend tomorrow. Right now you should go to bed.”
Izzy laughs. “Thanks to you, I’m probably too wired to sleep.”
8
Kate’s stalker in Iowa City was Chris, but she’s Chrissy tonight, wearing a shoulder-length dark wig and parked in her unobtrusive Kia outside the Country Inn the group Chrissy fell in with knows everything about Kate’s stay in this particular quadrant of the Quad Cities.
Chrissy latched onto a scruffy-looking dude in a Hawaiian shirt who called himself Spacer. Spacer had several posters he hoped to get signed, plus some eight-by-ten glossies. He took Chrissy under his wing, probably hoping to take her to bed later on. Chrissy understood that even with her best makeup on she was no pin-up queen, but for guys like Spacer, still stippled with adolescent acne although he had to be at least thirty, beggars couldn’t be choosers.
To the motley crew waiting outside the RiverCenter, Kate was prey and Spacer was one of the hunters. He called getting autographs “nailing the celebs” and explained to Chrissy that his group of fellow hunters had a text-and-phone network that included people (ratboys and ratgirls, in Spacer-lingo) at the town’s four or five best hotels (good) and three of the RiverCenter ushers (better). The core group of celeb-nailers paid them either in cash or salable autographs.
“Kate’s especially good, because someone might shoot her,” Spacer told Chrissy. “If that happened her value would go way, way up. It’s what happened when someone stabbed Salmon Rushiddy.”
It takes her a moment to realize he’s talking about Salman Rushdie. “What an awful idea.”
“Yeah, tell me about it, but it’s a contentious fuckin society, my darl… oh jeez, here she comes!” He raised his voice to a foghorn shout Chrissy could hardly believe came from that skinny body. “Kate! Kate, over here! My sister is your biggest fan! She couldn’t come, she’s in a wheelchair!”
The assembled autograph hunters began to converge on Kate… then, the unexpected. Chrissy and Spacer watched, amazed, as the big man with the bat came busting out of the crowd and went for Kate. Watched as the skinny older woman serving as Kate’s security kicked a chair in front of the batman and sent him sprawling.
“Goal!” Spacer cried, and chortled.
The autograph wolves on Pershing got nothing signed—Kate and her assistant were gone in a flash—but Chrissy has no interest in valuable memorabilia. She got the actual room numbers from Spacer, and then ditched him.
Now Kate’s room is dark, and so is 306, the assistant’s room. In between, in 304, the skinny bodyguard has neglected to close her drapes. Chrissy can see her striding back and forth, gesturing, yanking at her hair, and jabbering away on her phone. Before tonight, Chrissy didn’t see her as a problem, but the speed with which she reacted to the batman has caused Chrissy to rethink her assessment.
The skinny bodyguard ends the call. Closes the drapes. A few minutes later, her light also goes out. It’s time for Chrissy to go back to her own place on the other side of town, a shacky collection of cabins called the Davenport Rest. Thanks to Andy Fallowes, she could afford better, but it’s all she deserves.
As she pulls onto the gravel apron in front of Cabin 6, her phone chirps softly (Chris, with whom she shares the phone, has a far more masculine ring). It’s Deacon Fallowes, calling from one of his endless supply of burners.
“How goes the hunt, dear one?” he asks.
“Well, let’s put it this way,” Chrissy says. Her voice is low, with a kind of Bonnie Tyler rasp. “She’s breathing borrowed air.”
“Where are you?”
“Davenport. She’s going to Madison next. It’s a day off. I’ll sleep in a little, then follow. I may be able to take her there, but if I’m going to accomplish our goal without sacrificing myself, Buckeye City might be the best bet. Kate got shoved out of her date there by some singer, but they’ve rescheduled her for the night before. Singer gave up her final rehearsal, or sound check, or whatever they call it. I heard it tonight.”
“How?”
“The cancelation and date change I got from McKay’s website. The rest… I met some people tonight who know just about everything. Autograph hunters, but on steroids. I think I can find them in every city on her tour. Some of them even follow her from place to place.” Then, belatedly: “Are we having a safe conversation, Deacon?”
“This phone is going into the river as soon as we’re done talking.” As always, Fallowes’s voice is low and pleasant. “Your mission is taking longer than I expected.”
“I got the wrong one in Reno, but that was just supposed to be a warning, anyway. In Omaha, the assistant intercepted the anthrax you sent. I vandalized her luggage. Left a message. Now they have a security woman, and she’s pretty good.”
Silence for a moment. Then Fallowes says, “This isn’t a prayer situation but a real-world solution we’re aiming for, and I can’t emphasize how important it is.” His voice rises and begins to take on that good old gospel pulpit rhythm. “The world must see there’s a price to be paid for apostasy. This woman cannot be allowed to preach her witchcraft. Exodus 22, dear one—Exodus 22.”
“Yes,” Chrissy says. “I know it well.”
“And remember if you should be caught—God will protect you, but Satan is wily—you did this on your own.”
Chrissy feels a dull resentment at that, and perhaps Fallowes gets a sense of how she feels. He isn’t the devil, but he is wily.
“I wish it could all be a simple case of black and white, like with Brenda’s Bitches. Do you remember them?”
Chrissy smiles for the first time that night. “How could I forget? Those stupid scooters. That was quite a day, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. Yes it was. A hallelujah day for sure. Get some rest. I’ll call again.”
But I can never call you , Chrissy thinks. That would be risking your own precious butt, wouldn’t it?
She is horrified at such an ugly, resentful thought. It’s a Chris thought, and although he resides inside her—in a real sense, he is her Siamese twin—she sometimes hates him. As, she supposes, he sometimes hates her.
No, we are two.
Our secret.
Cabin 6 consists of one room with an attached bathroom the size of a closet. The bed sags. The overhead light globe is filled with dead flies. The place reeks with the wet-socks aroma of advanced mildew. In one corner, a pallid and warty toadstool has oozed up between two boards.
She thinks: Expiation.
He thinks: Soonest begun, soonest done.
They think: No, we are two. Separate and equal. Our secret.
Sometimes she gets tired and thinks, Why bother thinking about escape? Why bother when the expiation never ends? Why does God have to be so cruel?
She wishes she… he… they… could throw those thoughts, that apostasy , in an incinerator and burn them. God isn’t cruel, God is love. Her unhappiness… his… theirs… is nothing but sin-sickness, like a whiskey hangover. Their fault, not God’s.
She opens the bathroom door and slips the fingers of her right hand into the opening on the hinged side. Slowly she pulls the door toward her.
“I repent my rebellious thoughts,” she says.
The pain, first a pinch, becomes excruciating, but she continues to pull the door.
“I repent my fantasies.”
The skin splits on the backs of her fingers. Blood begins to run down the paint-peeling wood.
“I will complete my mission. I will not suffer the witch to live.”
She pulls tighter, and while she feels pain, she also feels the peace of expiation. She finally lets go of the door and pulls her throbbing fingers free. They will swell, but they’re not broken, and that’s good. She needs her good right hand, which she shares with her brother, to do the Lord’s work.