Last Breath Read online

  Maybe she was still over at Celia's? Maybe she was putting candles on the cake or tying a ribbon on a new bicycle? Maybe she was hiding in the dining room with the blue eighteen-speed, waiting to yell surprise? She had a hard time keeping things to herself. Sometimes she would give Christmas presents to people at Thanksgiving.

  It wasn't really his birthday, not until tomorrow, but Greg was going to Six Flags with his parents in the morning, so it was the only time he could be there, and Greg was his very best friend.

  He knew he'd be getting the blue bike he saw in the window of City Cycles, because his mother felt so bad about last year. She promised she would never forget one of his birthdays again. She'd go overboard on Nintendo cartridges and other things too, as she was prone to do. Never able to make up her mind, she ended up buying everything she looked at rather than selecting one thing.

  He looked in the laundry room, walked into the living room, then back through the dining room into the kitchen.

  "Mom?" He looked up the stairs.

  He grabbed the handrail. "Mom?" he said a little less loudly, a little less enthusiastically.

  He took the steps two at a time, walked the hall toward the bedrooms. Her door was open and a green dress was laid out on the bed. He saw nylons and jewelry lying next to it. Her purse was hanging on the doorknob, an envelope with one of his father's paychecks sticking out of it. She should have gone to the bank to deposit the checks before she went shopping.

  He checked the other bedrooms, all empty, looked down the hall, and saw the bathroom door was closed. He walked toward it, frowned as he bent over to pick up a piece of broken white cane protruding from under it.

  "Mom?" He opened the door slowly.

  He screamed.

  She was hanging from the old light fixture, naked, her face and hair covered by a black rubber mask with glass eyes and a respirator hose for a mouth. There was something stuck in the end of the hose, a rag perhaps or a kerchief.

  The clothes hamper was on its side beneath her feet, spilling yesterday's underwear and towels on the floor. She had a toe on it; he could see her foot arched like a ballerina's, muscles quivering to hold her weight up.

  He stepped into the room and could see her eyes now through the round glass windows. She was looking down at him, eyes wide, wild, intense.

  The phone rang.

  He heard the wicker groaning beneath her trembling foot as she tried to raise herself up again.

  He looked at her eyes for the longest time. Then he backed up and sat on the toilet seat and stared at her.

  The telephone rang again. It would be Greg, calling to tell him the bad news. That his mother hadn't come through, once again.

  And for what?

  He knew very well what this was, knew from exploring every inch of the house and his mother's hiding places, her so-called diary that she managed to write in fewer than a dozen times a year. She had done this to herself. This was the meaning of her "other place," her "dark world, the only place I can feel pleasure without pain." It was just one more of her fucking peculiarities, the crazy side of her that everyone was always pretending not to see.

  This mask, this noose, this thing she was doing to her body was more important than his birthday. This was the kind of shit she woke up thinking about rather than him. He wondered what she was thinking now.

  The telephone continued, the doorbell rang, someone knocked, and he ignored it all.

  He could still see her eyes from where he was sitting. She was watching him, eyes never blinking, toe trembling on the corner of that hamper. Finally he got up, walked over to the hamper, and kicked it out from under her.

  She dropped fast; their eyes locked together as she bounced. He stood there a few feet away, eyes never leaving hers, until he was sure she was dead, until there was no more soul looking back.

  He heard knocking at the door, persistent now. He walked to the window and looked out to see Celia. She would have known all along it wouldn't happen. Just like all the other mothers would have known. There never was going to be a birthday party. There never was going to be an eighteen-speed bicycle. She'd forgotten about him again. Just like the times she forgot to pick him up at school, or when she was supposed to take him to a movie or come to parents' day or the soccer game or the school play. He had all but stopped saying it. That his mother was going to be somewhere or she was going to do this or that. He couldn't stand that look on the other kids' faces.

  "You didn't forget to do this, did you?" he said to his dead mother, his chin trembling. "How in the fuck did you remember to do this?" He wiped angry tears from his eyes with the heels of his hands. "Was this more important than me?"

  He went to his room, got his pocketknife, and came back and cut her down. She collapsed in a heap at his feet. He grabbed her under the armpits and dragged her down the hall, where he put her on her bed.

  It took thirty minutes to get her into the clothes she had laid out, then he brushed her hair and cleaned the mucus and the smeared lipstick from her face.

  He put the noose back around her neck, then took the mask to his room, where he hid it under his mattress.

  Back in the bedroom he sat in a corner chair and looked at her until his father got home.

  It was nearly midnight.

  *

  The newspapers called it suicide and no one seriously questioned the fact. Mary Dentin had a screw loose, the neighbors told police. Mary was just like her own crazy mother, who stepped in front of a metro bus one Christmas morning.

  Mary's grandfather was the only next of kin she had, save husband and son, and he looked less than happy to be drawn into a funeral. That didn't really surprise the boy; his mother was always uncomfortable around the old man and it seemed there was no love lost between them. When he left after the service that day, the boy never saw him again.

  His own father was an outsider, even to his mother. He lived with her and he loved her, but he knew less about her than anyone in the world.

  Life changed after that. His father quit all three of his jobs. He would sit in his threadbare recliner all day with a newspaper in his lap and a pen in his hand. He had taken up his wife's erratic habits of smoking Pall Malls and drinking Maker's Mark bourbon. He filled the borders around the printed articles with random words like ROOM ROAD AUTOMOBILE BREACH GERMANY KOREA COLD. He would write the words in bold print, turning the paper sideways and upside-down, until there was no more room in which to write. Then he would fall asleep in his chair. He would still be there in the morning, staring vacantly at the paper as he bade him good-bye for school.

  For weeks it went on. The house remained silent, the lamps sparely lit. The phone never rang; friends never came to visit. It was as if they had all had died together.

  One day his father showed up at school, the station wagon packed tight with boxes, and they drove west.

  2

  MARCH 1, 2007

  CUMBERLAND GAP, MARYLAND

  The big sedan rolled to a stop. Sherry could hear the creak of metal gates being pulled back on their hinges. An electric window lowered and cold March air filled the cab. The driver exchanged words with a policeman, and the window closed again as the car lurched forward, dipping in and out of large washouts in the road.

  She rolled against the play of her shoulder harness, her mind on a conversation she had had with Glenn Schiff that morning. Schiff was now the attorney general for the State of Maryland, but Sherry remembered him as a much younger man, a young Justice Department attorney assigned to an organized crime task force out of Philadelphia when she was only twenty-one.

  Their meeting had been a watershed moment in Sherry's life. It was the result of an incident that had begun on a busy Philadelphia street corner, when a man having a fatal heart attack happened to grab Sherry's hand and pull her to the sidewalk with him. "She went down hard, white cane and all," pedestrians told police. "Man wouldn't let go of her hand, it took the ambulance crew to pry his fingers from her."

  Sher
ry's version of what happened was little different except that between the time the man died and the time her hand was removed from his, she saw something in her mind's eye that she couldn't explain. She saw a man being murdered.

  She first told her story to a young homicide detective, John Payne. Payne discovered there was a man missing who fit the description she had given him: a teamster boss who was supposed to testify before a government grand jury—prosecutor Glenn Schiff's grand jury—about pension fund fraud and the Mob.

  United States Attorney Schiff had the blind, would-be psychic brought before him, thinking she was part of some elaborate scheme of the Mafia's to dupe the government into believing their witness had died.

  He grilled Sherry Moore for hours until he was sure that she really had never heard of the man who grabbed her hand or the murdered teamster or any other organized crime figure before the day she recounted her story to Detective Payne. But how could he explain Moore's paranormal abilities to a jury? Schiff had lost the testimony of his murdered star witness, a murder Sherry could describe in alarming detail, but he sure as hell couldn't use her in court.

  In the end, he decided to strike all reference to her from the official record and settle for a prosecution built around the hard evidence in the case. Sherry wasn't upset in the least. Sherry, young and unnerved, had had enough excitement.

  Or so she thought at the time.

  A government stenographer, who recorded the Sherry Moore interrogation by Schiff, later leaked the story about Sherry's vision to the press, and neither the Philadelphia Police Department's homicide division nor the United States Attorney's Office could deny it.

  Sherry Moore became an overnight sensation. Everyone was suddenly interested in the blind orphan who lived in the projects of Philadelphia.

  That was in 1992, the last time she spoke to Glenn Schiff.

  Things had changed considerably for both of them since those days. For Sherry, notoriety brought financial freedom among other things. When she was first able to afford a private education, she decided against a formal academic curriculum in favor of martial arts training. There was a sensei in Philadelphia who was famous for teaching karate to blind children.

  As it turned out, the sensei agreed to come to her house twice weekly and give her private lessons, and though initially it was to have been a short-term arrangement, the sensei was so impressed by Sherry's dedication that the lessons continued for more than a decade. Sherry worked her way through the belts like a virtuoso in the making. Her dream was to transform sound and instinct into vision. She was determined to interpret what was around her. Was the hand coming at her a greeting or a threat? Should she meet it with a kick or a block or simply take it and shake?

  Becoming physically sharp wasn't so much a choice in her mind as a necessity. She could read and listen and learn at her leisure. But to feel and appear confident in a world of darkness, she knew she needed an edge. She needed some kind of training to heighten her remaining four senses. That was what the fighting arts did for her. It was a marriage of mind and body, bringing balance, composure, confidence, and a perceptible inner calm. Sherry credited the martial arts with getting her through the worst emotional days of her life. Until now. Now she was faltering, and badly. And she knew it.

  If Sherry had been surprised to hear Glenn Schiff's voice, she was not in the least surprised by the purpose of his call. A major news story had been unfolding out of western Maryland over the past twenty-four hours. Police in the mountains of Cumberland Valley had been called to the grounds of a defunct meat-processing plant, where someone had discovered three bodies in a refrigeration container. Police wouldn't confirm the identities of the victims, but reporters were speculating they might be the remains of three women abducted along rural I-70 almost two years before.

  The story of the missing women was familiar to anyone who was living in the Northeast at the time. Two of the women were last seen in the office buildings they worked in. One, a caterer and the wife of a Washington County police lieutenant, was delivering hors d'oeuvres to an after-hours meeting of health care executives nearby.

  All three buildings were just off a forty-mile stretch of the interstate highway between Hagerstown and Frederick, Maryland.

  The kidnappings spanned an eleven-week period between June 10 and August 27, 2005.

  Sherry remembered the cases well enough. The cable news anchors had dubbed them the Office Park Kidnappings and they were headlined throughout the remainder of that year. The usual experts came out of the woodwork to talk on TV. There were private detectives and former police chiefs, FBI agents and forensic psychologists. There were the profilers as well, but profilers were getting to be too predictable when it came to suspected serial killers, as they were still blaming that same twenty-five-to thirty-five-year-old white male with a history of women issues.

  One crotchety old psychiatrist told Fox News, "He will appear normal to the rest of society, but not to the women he has tried to be intimate with. Those women," the psychiatrist said, "would remember something wrong about him, something a little off-key, a bizarre tendency, a hint of hostility"—she raised a painted eyebrow—" red flags, the women who knew him would have seen red flags."

  They found other experts who made much ado over the design of the employee parking lots where two of the women's cars were parked. They were modern "office park" settings, with grounds meant to complement the ebony glass and stucco buildings, esthetically pleasing mazes of asphalt landscaped with flowering trees and shrubs, but failing in the most basic of crime prevention tenets. They violated the line of sight.

  To security experts and cops the world over, ground cover was a bad thing. Police believed that whoever abducted the women was waiting behind the trees and bushes.

  A columnist for the Hagerstown Herald-Mail responded to the expert the following week using the headline: DUH?

  If the killer was waiting behind bushes in the parking lots, nothing of substance was ever found. There was nothing to indicate that the women had even made it to their cars. In fact two of the women's purses and car keys were found at their desks, as if they had left momentarily and intended to return.

  If anything could be assumed at all, it was that the kidnapper had a vehicle and was using the interstate to make his getaways. But experts thought it curious that none of the various security cameras that panned loading docks and rear entry doors picked up anything unusual. None of the abductions was ever in view of workers in adjacent office buildings or on access roads, where a passenger in a car might casually see a woman being forced into a car. None was ever in a parking lot that had been seeded—after the second woman's kidnapping—with policewomen acting as decoys.

  There had been a theory that the victims knew their abductor. Perhaps he was a security guard who rotated between the buildings or someone from a contract cleaning company or a copy machine repairman or the man who exchanged watercooler containers.

  They studied lists of every agency that did contract work with any of the buildings, but none of the vendors interviewed overlapped between the various organizations, and the theory was eventually dismissed.

  The fact that two of the women left personal items behind suggested that the women had exited the buildings suddenly. Though all three buildings were alarmed with infrared, none had needed security entrances or cameras trained on employees, so if the women walked out the front door willingly and agreed to meet someone off the property, no one would have been the wiser. They could have gone almost anywhere.

  In August the FBI joined the investigation, which by then included police officers from Washington and Frederick Counties, Maryland State Police, and the City of Hagerstown, all of them amassing hundreds of hours of overtime. They set up night vision surveillances on rooftops and checkpoints on main thoroughfares, and used policewomen dressed as office workers strolling to their cars in parking lots at late and unusual hours.

  And nothing ever happened.

  Then came the night of A
ugust 27, 2005, when a maroon van with a broken taillight was spotted driving erratically on I-70 west of Frederick, Maryland. A trooper attempted to pull the van over and a high-speed pursuit ensued, ending when the van flipped over the side wall of an overpass. It fell fifty feet to the four-lane highway beneath it and the fuel tank exploded. The occupants, two teenage boys from Ellicott City, a town on the fringes of Baltimore, were killed instantly. So was the young woman they had just kidnapped from a downtown Frederick office building.

  Unlike the first three kidnappings, there was plenty of evidence in the Frederick parking lot. A witness saw the woman being pushed into the back of the van. The victim dropped her car keys on the sidewalk next to her car. Police found a full five-finger handprint left by one of the teens on the victim's car window. The whole incident was caught on videotape from a loading dock cam.

  It was, Attorney General Glenn Schiff said, everything the first three kidnappings were not.

  The FBI agreed with that assessment. The acne-faced teens weren't at all the white male, twenty-five to thirty-five, with a history of abuse and women issues that their profilers typed.