Down Here

“But, in looking at these cases, you don’t see that . . . personal element at all. You see the criminal-justice system jumping the rails. You see cops concerned with their crime-clearance rate, just like you see prosecutors obsessed with their conviction rates. Working together. But that kind of mind-set is just as likely to tip the scales the other way.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, moving away from me and sitting up.

“A prosecutor who wants a perfect conviction rate can give some plea bargains that are real bargains. I’ve seen cases where a defendant confesses to a couple dozen different crimes, and only gets sentenced for one of them.”

“But that person would still be guilty, wouldn’t he?”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“Why would they ever—?”

“Did you ever read about the Boston Strangler case?”

“I heard of it. But it was a long time ago, wasn’t it?”

“The Sixties. A serial killer was at large. The public was panicked. The media—and this is the key to the whole dynamic—was demanding action. Everyone was on the spot. They already had this guy—Albert DeSalvo was his name—on a whole ton of sex crimes. Different MO—not a homicide in the bunch—but more than enough to give him a life sentence.

“So now they’ve got DeSalvo in a prison where they evaluate defendants to see if they’re competent to stand trial. Out of the blue, he makes a deal to confess to all the strangling cases.”

“Plead guilty?”

“It was a little trickier than that. He ‘clears up’ the cases, gives the police information about the crimes, stuff like that. But the deal is, since there’s no other evidence he was the Strangler—no fingerprints, no blood, no body fluids, no witnesses, nothing—the confession can’t be used. So DeSalvo gets the same life sentence he would have gotten anyway, and everyone’s happy.”

“I still don’t see what’s so horrible. I mean, what he did, of course. But he still went to prison for life.”

“What if he wasn’t the Strangler?”

“What? Then why would he—?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I wasn’t there. But a lot of people, today, think he was lying about those crimes. Especially relatives of the victims. There’s a whole new investigation going on now.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” she said, her tone just below angry.

“He was going down for the count anyway. And he wasn’t going to do an extra day for the Strangler’s crimes. Maybe he got some money . . . from a book deal or whatever. Maybe he just wanted to be famous—the cops get confessions like that all the time.”

“Did the crimes stop after he was arrested?” she asked. I caught the faintest whiff of triumph in her voice— the cold-blooded researcher, confronting the “believer” with the hard facts.

“They did,” I said. “But if he got the information—about the crimes—from someone else, that person could have been locked up, too. With DeSalvo. Maybe in the nuthouse.”

“What does he say?”

“DeSalvo?”

“Yes. Well, what does he say about it, now that all that time has passed?”

“He’s not saying anything,” I told her. “A few years after he went to prison, he was stabbed to death.”

“Oh my God. Who did it?”

“Nobody knows,” I said. “Or, at least, nobody was ever charged with it.”

Laura bent over to light a pair of candles on an end table. “Can you see me?” she asked over her shoulder.

“Perfectly. But I’d rather have a closer look.”

“You will. But, first, could you close your eyes? Just for a minute?”

“Sure,” I said, dropping my eyelids, but leaving a slit open at the bottom. I learned how to do that when I was a kid—the trick is to keep your eyelids from fluttering.

Laura dropped to her knees, pulled out the lowest drawer in a dark wood bureau. She rooted around for a few seconds. When she stood up, she held something clasped in her hands.

She came over to the bed, climbed on next to me, and knelt, keeping her back very straight.

“What do you do when you’re afraid of something?” she said, very softly.

“What do people do, or what do I do, personally?”

“You.”

“It depends on what it is that I’m afraid of.”

“Tell me.”

“If it’s something I can avoid, I do that. If it’s something I can’t, I try to overcome it.”

“How?”

“How? I don’t know. It depends on what it is.”

“Give me an example?”

Oh, I could do that, I thought. I could give you enough “examples” to haunt your dreams for the rest of your life.

But I’m a Child of the Secret. We don’t talk to outsiders. Except when we lie. Because They taught us well. We know we’re never safe.

And just because you’re one of Us doesn’t mean you can’t also be one of Them.

“Public speaking,” I said. “I was scared to death to get up in front of—”

“That’s not fear,” she cut me off, sharply. “That’s a . . . phobia. Didn’t you ever—?”

“A bully,” I said. “How’s that?”

“That’s very good,” she said. Kneeling, with her hands clasped.

“When I was a kid,” I said, feeling the dot of truth inside my story expand the margins of the lie, “I was scared all the time. Of this one guy. He took stuff from me. Just because he was bigger. Just because he could do it. And he hurt me, too.”

“Did you tell your parents?”

“It wasn’t the kind of thing I could tell my parents about,” I said. More truth, wrapped in a mourner’s cloak.

“What did you do?”

“I tried to stay away from this other guy,” I said. “But he made it impossible.” Yeah, I thought, “impossible,” when you’re a little kid, and the other guy is the teenage son of the degenerate freaks who have custody of your orphaned body.

“What happened, finally?”

“I hit him with a baseball bat,” I lied.

“Oh! Did you hurt him badly?”

“Bad enough so he never bothered me again,” I said. The baseball bat was true enough. I didn’t tell Laura how I had followed it with a can of gasoline, and a match. By the time I was done, every human living in that house of demons was, too.

“Good! I hate bullies, don’t you?”

“Ever since I was old enough to know what they are,” I said, switching to pure, undiluted truth.

“See what I’ve got?”

I opened my eyes. She was holding up a pair of handcuffs.

“Being . . . restrained has always terrified me. I . . . I keep these as kind of a test. Usually, I’m afraid to even look at them.”

“You were handcuffed once?”

“Oh, no,” she said, way too much certainty in her voice. “Nothing like that. I’ve always been this way. When I was a little girl, and they played cowboys and Indians, I would never let anyone tie me up.”

“Some things, it’s good to be afraid of. Just common sense.”

“Maybe that’s why I went into my line of work. There’s a lot of risk—one day, you’re getting a huge bonus; the next, you’re out of a job—but there aren’t any . . . restraints.”