Eye of the Beholder Read online

  “How about you?” Luke asked Whitney. “Do you have anything to add?” Joy narrowed her eyes resentfully at her stepmother.

  “Yeah, I think I do,” Whitney said softly. She turned to the teenager and fixed her with a hard stare. “Joy, I know you hate me, and you don’t want to hear anything I have to say, but I don’t care. Your father is right. Keep it up and it’s only a matter of time before something very bad happens to you. The odds of your getting raped are excellent.”

  Joy snorted again and rolled her eyes to express that Whitney was full of shit and didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “I don’t know where you go when you run off or when you’re with your mom, but if you think these people have your best interests at heart, think again. You’re being used, and if you don’t want to see that, then you’re just plain stupid.” Whitney was surprised at herself for saying these things, but she was afraid for Joy, and nothing else had worked.

  Luke was nodding. “That pretty well sums it up. Now, my question.” He waited until the sheer fearful curiosity of it brought Joy’s eyes to his. “Is your mother doing drugs with you?”

  Joy’s jaw almost dropped; she was able to catch it only by gnashing her teeth together. How the hell did he know that? She covered as best as she could. “No! What are you talking about?”

  “Your mom was in pretty bad shape for a while when you were little. I had custody of you from the time you were a year old until you were two and a half. But she seemed to get her shit together and I figured you needed a mom, so I agreed to split custody later. But I know she’s been having trouble lately, and it wouldn’t take much to push her back over the edge. I need you to tell me the truth.”

  Joy looked away. She thought about scoring crystal meth for her mom and then going out to do whatever she wanted while her mom stayed home and got high. The truth was, she had smoked with her mom once, but it had been too weird. She preferred to go off with her friends and not see her mom strung out and talking shit. Her mother was embarrassing enough sober.

  “No,” she said. Her mouth and her heart both felt dry and scratchy.

  Luke watched her until she squirmed, but he said nothing.

  “Can I go now?” Joy asked finally, in an impertinent voice.

  “Yes, but remember what we told you,” her father said with finality. Joy hurried from the room, trying desperately to look put out. When she was gone Luke turned to Whitney.

  “She’s lying,” he said simply.

  “Obviously, but what can we do when she’s with us only half the week?”

  Luke sighed, and, reaching out, he put one hand on the back of Whitney’s neck and rubbed. “I can talk to Pam—or try, anyway.” Whitney made a little snorting noise. “I know, but if she is doing drugs again she might let us keep Joy for most of the week, and then we can have a little more consistency on the discipline.”

  “Oh, please,” Whitney said irritably. “The minute you ask Pam for anything she’ll demand the opposite just to be a bitch. She fights us on everything because she hates that you’re with me instead of with her. She’s never thought for a minute about what’s best for Joy; you know that. She fought us about getting Joy a health plan, for God’s sake! You know the energy she puts into trying to undermine us. What a waste,” Whitney finished limply.

  “I know, but remember, she might see this as a way to help herself.” He sighed and raised his other hand palm up in a questioning way. “And I have only one other choice: wait until the police call, or she gets violated and comes home to Daddy.”

  Whitney took his hand and pressed it. “That’s not a choice.”

  “No, I know.”

  Back upstairs, Joy threw herself on her bed and cried in confused hurt and fury. They didn’t get it! They didn’t know anything. Her older friends were the only ones who understood.

  She had to take care of something else, though. She sat up and wiped her face, brushing the tears angrily away, then went to her door and listened. At the bottom of the stairs in the kitchen she could hear the murmur of voices. Good.

  Glancing out her window, she looked down and could see Joshua sitting on his porch. He was such a goody-goody; they’d trust him. Yes. That was perfect.

  Going to her dresser, she pulled open the bottom drawer, stopped to listen again, and then reached underneath it, peeling off the thin cardboard that she’d duct-taped to the bottom. Sandwiched between the board and base of the drawer were several small, triangular plastic bags filled with white powder. She stuffed them quickly into the bottom of her shoe.

  She moved down the stairs as quietly as possible and didn’t speak until she got to the kitchen. Then she flashed her cigarettes and a lighter. “Would it be acceptable for me to walk outside?”

  “Don’t leave the yard,” Luke told her firmly.

  “Fine,” she said sarcastically. “I’ll just shout at Joshua across the driveways.” She started to move toward the door.

  Whitney glanced at Luke, and both of them shared the same thought: Joshua would be a good influence for a change, a nice kid who was closer to her own age. Luke nodded slightly at Whitney’s questioning look.

  “You can go to Joshua’s house if you want, but no farther.” Whitney fell slightly short of sounding as authoritative as Luke, but she was feeling sorry for Joy. It was tough enough being a teenager, and having a mother like Pam made an already difficult time into a tour of duty in a foreign country riddled with land mines.

  The lighter flared the minute she stepped onto the porch and she inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with the calming toxins of nicotine. Doing something everyone told her she shouldn’t gave her some kind of relief from the other oppressive directives. She waved a limp hand at Joshua and he waved back.

  When he spotted her coming through the door, Joshua sat up quickly. He tried not to look too eager as he returned her greeting.

  “Hi!” he called out. “What’s up?”

  Joy crossed her arms, blew out a long, slow trail of smoke, exaggerated by the moist, chilly air, and then started to scuff her way down her porch steps and through the damp pine straw toward him. “Oh, not much. What are you doing out here?”

  “Enjoying the weather.”

  Joy looked deliberately around at the dismally cold, misty day, and then back at him.

  “I happen to like it,” he told her before she said anything. “And this thing I’m wearing is called a coat,” he added. “You should get one.”

  “So that I can sit around by myself in the rain?”

  Joshua felt a blush warm his numb cheeks. He couldn’t say that he’d been waiting there in the hope of seeing her. So instead he asked, “How’s it going?” trying to be upbeat but not a geek.

  “It couldn’t get much worse, so at least there’s that.” She had reached the bottom of his stairs, and she stopped and wrapped her arms tightly around herself. Although the rain had taken a break, there was a kind of mist hanging in the air.

  “C’mon, it can’t be that bad.”

  “You know that thing you said about ‘it’s all part of the web’?” She looked at him and took a long draw. He nodded and she went on: “Well, I’m the fly that’s stuck in the web, trapped in sticky shit with all the blood sucked out of me.”

  Joshua laughed. “Listen, it is kind of chilly out here. You want to come in and . . . I don’t know . . . have something warm to drink or”—he felt crippled, inept—“something?”

  She shrugged, “Sure. I’d like to see your room.”

  “Really?”

  “Why do you sound so surprised? Wait, don’t tell me—is it all decorated with Britney Spears posters or something?”

  Joshua fixed his face into an air of innocence and said, “Never heard of him.”

  Joy suppressed a smile. In spite of her efforts at disdain, she was beginning to like him. There was something about him she couldn’t put her finger on. With the older crowd she hung with, she often felt like a fraud, someone who was just pretending to fit in.
With Joshua, she never felt like she was about to be found out.

  They walked through the kitchen, where Greer was standing chopping onions at the large butcher block in the center of the room. A wonderful smell of browning meat came from a large, heavy casserole on the stove. She greeted Joy kindly and said, “I’m making you guys hot chocolate; it’ll be ready in a minute. You want marshmallow crème?”

  Joy looked at her, surprised. It was such a kid thing to drink, but she loved it. “Uh, yeah, sure.”

  “Me too,” Joshua said. “Thanks, Mom. We’re going up to my room for a few minutes.”

  Greer smiled, happy that Joy was here and safe. “Fine. But, Joshua?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I need you to pick up a few things at the grocery store later.” She pointed at a short handwritten list on the bulletin board where they kept people’s cards and phone numbers.

  “Okay, no problem.”

  The pair of teenagers tromped up the stairs, Joshua chatting happily about his CD collection, completely aware that he was talking way too much but unable to shut up, until they got to his room.

  Joy paused in the doorway and looked around. It wasn’t what she had been expecting; it was nice, actually, very comfortable. The bed was made, covered in some kind of really soft-looking comforter in dark green. The walls were a tan color, and there was a large black-and-white photo framed on the wall of a moon over a village in what looked like the Southwest. Joshua saw her looking at it.

  “Do you like it?”

  “It’s okay,” was all Joy would admit to, but her voice betrayed that she was a little more impressed than that.

  “Do you like Ansel Adams?”

  The name meant nothing to Joy, but instead of admitting it she echoed Joshua’s joke: “Never heard of him.” Then she added, “Nice moon.”

  Joshua stood awkwardly in the center of his room. “Uh, do you want to sit down?”

  “Sure.” Joy circled around him, then chose the chair at his desk. She looked out the window. “You can see my bedroom from here,” she commented, and turned to look at him with her eyebrows raised.

  “Can you?” Joshua asked, but his voice was too high.

  Joy laughed again. It was fun to see his confidence a little shaken. “It’s cool. I’ll just keep my curtains closed at night now.” She pretended to look through his CDs, which were in a standing rack next to the desk. She tried to be casual. “You know what? Would your mom mind if we had the hot chocolate up here and listened to some music?”

  Joshua could think of nothing better, but he forced himself to move at a normal speed toward his door. “Sure. You pick something and I’ll go get it.”

  “Thanks.” Joy smiled at him and then pretended to study the titles again. She heard him hit the top of the stairs and run down.

  She stood up and swept the room with her eyes. She had only a little time, and it had to be good.

  Where in the hell could she hide this stuff?

  Chapter 20

  Detective Sheridan watched as the girl was loaded into the back of the ambulance. Her face was so swollen and distorted that it would have been impossible to tell it was a girl if she hadn’t been naked when the maid had found her.

  The siren wailed and the emergency vehicle pulled away, headed for the hospital, the flashes from the red and white lights falling strangely short and blunted in air that felt as heavy as a wet gray sweater. After all his years on the force, he didn’t have much hope for her pulling through. Whoever had done that to her was one disturbed monster, and he felt a sick, acidic gnawing in his gut that this was no isolated incident.

  It was the mark that made it different. The marking was the twisted indicator of a serial freak. He sighed, wondering who the girl was and what she was like. Had she gone with this guy willingly or had he forced her? Was she from around here, somewhere nearby, or another state? Los Angeles County had a surplus of runaway teenagers, and there were far too many Jane Does in his unsolved murder files.

  Turning, he surveyed the depressing roadside motel whose rooms made a horseshoe-shaped semicircle around a barren parking lot in Chatsworth. The whole layout sloped slowly down toward the street side. Bad luck, thought Detective Sheridan. You’ve got to turn a horseshoe up, or all the luck runs out.

  His stomach churned and twisted. He didn’t have much hope of finding a reliable witness here. This was the kind of place where they made it a point not to know anybody else’s business. He’d already talked to the clerk who’d rented the room. She was the owner’s wife, a puckered skeleton of a woman who had the loose-toothed look of a crack smoker. She claimed she’d been busy watching her favorite TV show when the guy came in and she didn’t notice anything. She couldn’t remember if it was this one guy with a beard or this other guy who she thought might have had a mustache; she couldn’t recall which one had taken which room. Neither one of the two men, who had come in about the same time the night before, had shown ID, and Sheridan doubted the name and address on the registration card of number fourteen would be worth the pencil it was scribbled in. From the smell of the woman’s breath and the bottle of Wild Turkey he had seen in the office, he doubted she would be in any condition to notice, much less remember, anything useful past eight o’clock on any given night. She did say she was pretty sure that both of the men who had come in and gotten rooms the previous night had been on motorcycles; what kind of motorcycle, she had no idea.

  That narrowed it right down to a couple of million suspects. Sheridan swore and kicked at the curb as he walked back toward the room. He hated the crime and the abuse he saw every day, lived for the few times he could actually get one of these degenerates off the street. But more than anything he despised the psychopaths, the ones who did what they did because they enjoyed it. No, that wasn’t right, exactly. It wasn’t only that he despised them; he feared them. There was no logic, no predictability to how and when they would strike, leaving him helpless.

  He stood in the room and watched the white-coated officer gathering up any material evidence he could find. They’d get a sperm sample from the girl; that he was sure of. The blood and excrement were most likely all hers. Any hair they found would be useless, as even an idiot public defender could argue that the hotel room was used by hundreds of people every year.

  Yet, there was the mark. That was something different. Sheridan turned and looked out at the traffic in the failing half-light. Did it mean something? Lead somewhere? His stomach flared into action again. He pulled a roll of Tums from his pocket and popped six in his mouth, crunching them expertly. This was his third pack today. He looked again at the stains on the sheets and tried to tell himself that it wasn’t his fault, that maybe this was just a onetime thing.

  But the burning in his gut told him differently. Like a power line in the rain, the pain crackled and sizzled with a message for him, a warning sign that every fiber in his body had learned not to ignore.

  There was a monster loose out there, someone with an appetite for sadistic pain. A monster who was sated for the moment, but soon he would be hungry, eager to feed again.

  Chapter 21

  “Mom?” Joshua called out softly at the door of Greer’s bedroom.

  “Yes?” She turned from where she was sunk into the down pillows of an overstuffed armchair, with a large picture book of runes propped up on her lap. He recognized the book as one that Dario had given her on her last birthday.

  “Can I talk to you about something?”

  She put the book down and sat up higher in her chair. “Sure, come on in.”

  Joshua perched across from her on the edge of her bed and wondered where to begin. “It’s about Joy,” he started, and then corrected himself. “Actually, it’s about me, but it concerns Joy. At least, I think it does.”

  Greer smiled knowingly, but there was worry in her eyes.

  “It’s not what you think,” Joshua hastened to add upon seeing the smile. “I mean, I like her okay, I guess, but . . . it’s not that.”


  Not knowing what to expect now, and not wanting to rush or press her son, Greer said nothing, just waited quizzically.

  “I, uh, saw something.” Joshua stared at the carpet. There was a strange pattern woven into it, almost like one of the runes in the book now resting on the thick arm of his mom’s chair. “I don’t know what it was—maybe just a trick of the light or a bird or a branch or something.” Joshua took a deep breath and forced the worst of it out. “Or maybe I’m just seeing things.” He pretended to laugh a little, but his mother could hear the fear in it.

  “Maybe you should tell me what it was you saw and then we can take a guess?” Greer suggested.

  Joshua nodded. “Okay. First, the night Joy came over for dinner, when we went outside, I thought I saw a figure-ish thing, like a person kind of”—he searched for an appropriate description—“floating over Joy’s shoulder. And then a few days later I could see her in her window, and I saw a different figure over her, and then I saw a . . . a shape.” He trailed off, afraid to look at his mother, afraid she would be looking back at him with fear in her eyes. Fear for him.

  But he needn’t have been alarmed. In reality she was watching her son with a growing wonder. “Joshua,” she said softly, “did you feel something when you saw these things?”

  He looked up and saw to his amazement that her eyes were moist and glowing. “Uh, yeah, as a matter of fact. Different things.”

  He described both of his disturbing bouts. “The first time I thought it was man’s figure, kind of”—Joshua raised his right hand and waved it in the air beside his head over his right shoulder—“here. She was walking away from me, outside, and I thought it might have been a bat.”

  “Was the figure doing anything?” Greer asked.

  “Um, holding out his arms, one to Joy and one toward me. At least, that’s what it kind of looked or felt like.” Joshua laughed again self-consciously.