Abandoned

“I guess I would.”

“He contacted me a few days later, again while I was chatting online. Did you get my proof? he asked. I said I did. Then he put the hook in me.” He pauses. “I guess I should say, he handed me the hook and had me put it in myself.” He puffs on the cigarette, no longer smirky or nasty. “You ever read Faust? The bargain with Mephistopheles?”

“Sure.”

“There’s the guy, Faust,” Hollister says, telling us the story anyway. “He’s an alchemist/scientist kind of guy. A seeker of truth. He’s frustrated because he’s reached the limit. Can’t find out more about life, the universe and everything. The devil notices and makes a bargain: He’ll serve Faust until the moment Faust reaches some highest point of happiness possible—then he gets his soul. Faust says, ‘Sure, why not,’ because he’s certain that moment will never come. He’ll get the devil’s help learning the secrets of the universe, but he’ll never have to pay the piper. Problem is, he does.” He sighs. “Dali gave me a choice, but he didn’t make me choose. I did that on my own.”

Of course, I think, God saves Faust in the end, because He sees the value in Faust’s striving. Faust’s bargain, however misguided, was made in the direction of a worthwhile endeavor: acquisition of knowledge. Hollister sold his soul for a lot less.

“He told me,” Hollister continues, “that he was going to give me a day to think about things. If you decide to go on from here, he said, there’s no turning back. We’ll be entering into an agreement. You’ll be making promises to me. Break a promise and there will be consequences. Then he signed off.”

“Did you think about it?” I ask, truly curious.

He contemplates me, not with contempt this time. There’s some recognition from him of the question’s value. “Not much,” he admits. “I just wanted her gone. I think he probably knew that. He knew I was caught the moment he offered to help me. Everything else was just reeling me in.”

He’s probably right. Sociopaths tend to understand each other. Birds of a feather.

“What did he offer you?” Alan asks.

Hollister is getting tired. The adrenaline high of the last few days is wearing off. He’s looking into the future now, I imagine. Years of a prison cell, with memories of his dead son’s eyes, begging him for life. He takes a last drag of his fourth cigarette and stubs it out on the coffee table. He doesn’t light another.

“He told me he could make both Heather and her boyfriend disappear. He’d take them away. He didn’t tell me if he was going to kill them or not, just that no one would ever find them.”

“I assume you were supposed to pay him something?”

“That was the brilliant part. I’d wait seven years and then get her declared legally dead, sans body. I’d collect on the life insurance and then he would contact me for delivery—in cash—of half the amount. It seemed risk-free. There would be no body, so no one could prove murder. Seven years would pass. That’s a long time. People would have moved on to other things.

“You have to do only three things, he told me. Say yes, live your life normally for seven years, and then give me my half of the insurance money when it comes.” His grin is sickly. His pallor has changed even in the short time of this interview. He is pale, drained. “So I said yes. A week later Heather and her boy toy were gone. He only contacted me one other time, with a warning. Remember—consequences, he said. Turn on me in any way, and terrible, terrible things will happen to you and the people you care for.”

Now I’m finally seeing what happened. “You didn’t pay him,” I say. “I’m right, aren’t I? The money came in, and you didn’t pay him.”

“Seven years had passed!” He speaks in a whine, like a small boy trying to justify himself. “We’d gotten on with our lives, we were happy. Hell, I’d kind of forgotten about him. Well, not forgotten … more like …” He pauses, searching for the words. “Like it never really happened. Like it was something I dreamed. You know? I mean, he never contacted me during that time. Never. And I had no way to contact him. He just didn’t seem real anymore.

“Then one day he emails me and says it’s time for me to pay up. Out of the blue.” He shrugs, and it’s a gesture of cautious amazement. “I deleted the email. One little button push. It scared me, but it also kind of made me feel strong.” A muscle in his cheek jumps. “I remember thinking, how do I know he’s still got Heather? Maybe he killed her right off.” His eyes dart back and forth between Alan and me. They are filled with petulance and self-righteousness. “There was a good chance he had nothing on me. I had a new life. That money belonged to us!”

I can withhold myself no longer. I should, but I can’t. I walk over so that I am standing behind the video camera. I pause the recording and look down on him, mustering all the contempt I can find, which in this case is plenty.

“You’re a shitty excuse for a human being, Douglas. You’d gotten on with your life? You were happy? Do you know what was happening to Heather that whole time? She was cuffed or chained and left by herself in the dark. For eight years! While you watched TV and fucked your new wife and went to Little League with your sons. You robbed her of everything. And why? Because you didn’t want to be married to her anymore?” I put my palms against my eyes for a second, because I’m losing it. I steady myself. “I know I’m wasting my breath, but I want you to think about something, Douglas. Think about all the times you were sitting in this nice house, having a nice dinner, while Heather was naked and screaming in the darkness, probably not knowing why or if her sons were alive or dead or maybe in some dark room next to her.”

He snarls then, a last defiance. Maybe he finds a surge of strength because I’m everything he seems to despise so much. “She deserved every minute for what she did to me. If it wasn’t for her, Dana would be fine, and Avery would still be alive.”

I gape at him, aghast. I’ve seen it before, of course, this kind of unbelievable displacement of responsibility. A pedophile once told me, in all seriousness: But they wanted me to touch them. If they want it, it’s natural, and you can’t fight nature, right?

It’s my turn to slump, to feel drained. I push the record button again. “Finish up with him,” I tell Alan. “You can fill me in on anything pertinent later.”

“Too much for you to handle?” Hollister sneers. “Just like all the fem-cows. You want the same job as a man, but you can’t handle it when things get messy, when the pressure is really on.”

I can’t muster any anger. That’s okay. Exhaustion fits my reply best anyway.

“Douglas, the problem I have isn’t that it’s too messy to confront. The problem I have is that you’re so”—I look for the word—“unoriginal. You caused so much pain, but in the end you’re a caricature. Do you understand what I’m saying? You don’t scare me: You make me tired.”

He has no reply but hate. He shows it to me as he has throughout: with his eyes.

I turn and walk away, opening the sliding glass door and letting myself out into the blessed freedom of the backyard.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“Burns called some uniforms to come and take Hollister away,” Alan says.

I’m standing in the large backyard—which is much like the front yard, just a single tree and waves of too- green grass—looking at nothing. Trying to make sense of everything I just heard. “He really had no way of contacting this Dali?” I ask.

“Nope. Hollister never initiated contact. The perp always contacted him, either by email or cell phone. The emails were always from a free service provider, like Yahoo or Gmail. He tried calling back on some of the cell phone numbers when things blew up, but they were all out of service.”

“They were probably pay-as-you-go phones.” I sigh. “He’s smart. Controlling the contact limits his exposure. He provides proof that he can deliver without ever actually meeting Hollister, and he doesn’t disclose the payment details until it’s time.” I glance at Alan. “I’m assuming they never met?”

“Not once face-to-face.”