A Question of Ghosts Read online

  Jo moved swiftly between them, just a small step, but one that placed her squarely between Becca and Voakes, and Becca lowered her head and released a small gasp of relief.

  “If you feel you’ve delivered enough shock value, John, I’ll ask you to sit down.”

  Emily didn’t raise her voice, and Becca trusted Voakes wasn’t doing anything too alarming. She imagined him and Jo Call locking eyes, and was glad she couldn’t see it. Then she decided she had to see it. She moved from behind Jo and regarded the man fully.

  John William Voakes was indeed studying Jo avidly, his head cocked to one side. And inevitably, Becca was reminded of the banality of evil. She had looked into the faces of fathers who tried to smother their infants because they cried at night, and most of them held this same bizarre, discordant look of normality.

  Apparently, his little surprise had cost him. Voakes was weaving on his feet now, and the color was draining from his face. Jo’s silent immobility, her flat gaze, might have prompted this weakening, but he was obviously a sick man. He looked at Becca again.

  The lower lids of Voakes’s colorless eyes were rimmed in moist red. He held out his hand to Becca, and his voice was gentle and wetly sibilant. “Hello, Clarice.”

  Becca stared at him, ignoring his hand, and he lowered it to his side.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Healy.” Voakes smiled again. Typical of Western State long-timers, his dental care had been lacking. “I’ve wanted to greet you with that for years.”

  “John, I told you to sit down. Now,” Emily said. “It wasn’t a suggestion.”

  Peter started as if nudged awake and brought the wheelchair around behind Voakes. He had to touch the back of its pedals against Voakes’s legs gently before he broke his gaze from Becca’s and settled stiffly into the chair. She could smell him from where she stood, a mixture of fresh earth and rank sweat and illness.

  “Let’s do this back in your room.” Emily’s voice hadn’t warmed. “It’s past time for your afternoon meds. Peter?”

  The big kid pushed the wheelchair slowly away from the garden, allowing some distance to grow between them. He leaned down and murmured something to Voakes, who nodded limply, his fatigue authentic now.

  “We had one of our units outfitted for hospice services.” Emily walked with them, her sandals clocking slowly on the cement walk. “There’s room for a hospital bed, IV stands, and the chair. Nurses from the hospice at Swedish Hospital visit morning and night to keep him comfortable.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Jo might be asking for an estimate on a plumbing repair.

  “Colon cancer, widely spread. He’s on palliative care. No further treatment is possible, so they’re just keeping him free of pain.”

  “That’s kind of them.” Jo waited while Peter inserted a keycard to unlock a private cottage at the edge of the walk. “He’s being kept separate from your other residents?”

  “They avoid him. He’s hardly an escape risk, but we never leave him unattended. Let’s let Peter get him settled.” Emily stopped them outside the door of a spacious bedroom. They watched as Peter parked the wheelchair beside the white bed and helped Voakes into it. He moved with the wincing hesitance of an elderly man with a terrible disease.

  “So basically, he was brought here to die,” Jo said.

  “He was allowed to come here because he’s dying. As a young man, John used to make his living as a gardener. He filed a plea to spend his remaining time here, tilling vegetables that will go to area food banks.”

  “Giving back to the community,” Jo said dryly.

  Emily shrugged. “It’s a matter of months. Maybe weeks.”

  Becca was fixed on Voakes, and she started a little at Emily’s touch on her arm.

  “Are you all right with this? It’s got to be hard for you.”

  “I’m fine. Thanks, Emily.” Becca meant it, on both counts. They entered the bedroom, which smelled sharply of disinfectant.

  “So this is supposed to be fifteen minutes.” Peter sounded brash, perhaps to atone for his earlier face-off with Jo. He handed Voakes a small paper cup and a plastic beaker with a straw, and waited until he downed the pills with two painful swallows. “That’s all he’s got in him, once these meds knock him out. You still okay with this, John?”

  Peter seemed to hope for some denial, but Voakes nodded weakly, sinking back against the stiff pillow. Peter raised the railing on the bed and elevated its front so Voakes sat erect. No effort was made to supply chairs for them, but Becca would rather stand. In addition to the disinfectant, the room was filling with the odor of a sweaty, dying old murderer. She felt Emily’s gaze on her and realized the floor was hers.

  “I want to ask you about the summer of nineteen seventy-eight.” Becca was relieved. Her voice was steady, and she could feel Jo’s solid presence behind her. “You were living in Seattle at that time, right?”

  “Yes.” Voakes eyes were closed, his stubbled face gray and slack.

  Becca knew of no delicate way to phrase this, and delicacy wasn’t called for. “I want to know if you shot two people in a home on Capitol Hill, in June of nineteen seventy-eight. Three years before the deaths of the Walmac family.”

  “You might have me mixed up with James Anthony Williams.” Voakes’s voice was thready, but it had lost the wet, lisping tone. “Don’t worry about it. It happens all the time.”

  “What?”

  “James Anthony Williams. Gary Leon Ridgway. Westley Allan Dodd.” Voakes thumbed spittle from the corners of his mouth. “The multi-murderous in this part of the country seem to go by more than our fair share of names, don’t we?”

  “Shannon Harps.” The name of the woman murdered by James Anthony Williams on Capitol Hill in 2008 swam up out of the murk of Becca’s memory, suddenly sharp and clear, because she was angry. She didn’t like the crafty pleasure surfacing on Voakes’s face. If he wanted to riff on the names of notorious madmen, the innocents slaughtered by them would be remembered, too. “I’m talking about shootings that happened thirty years earlier. I’m asking if you know anything about that night.”

  “John, you don’t have to say anything, now.” Emily was eyeing the recorder Jo held openly in one hand. “If you want an attorney present, we can arrange that.”

  “I’m not really mentally competent enough to know if I need an attorney.” Voakes grimaced against a sudden pain. “So nothing I say without one can be held against me. But thank you, Dr. Kelley.” He lifted one veined hand slightly, then let it drop back on the thin spread. “Can you come a little closer, Miss Healy? I’m not seeing very well, these days.”

  Becca kept her distance. “You don’t have to see me. Are you going to answer my question?”

  “I’ve pictured you, lots of times.” Voakes closed his wrinkled eyelids briefly. “You were such a blond, pretty little thing.”

  “John.” Emily’s tone was suddenly sharp. “Perhaps you should mention, at this time, that you’re very familiar with the history of the Seattle crime scene. Your doctors are aware that you kept newspaper articles on area crimes long before your arrest.”

  “That’s true.” A kind of sulking contrition tugged Voakes’s mouth downward. “I read all about your parents’ deaths, Miss Healy. I saw the photograph in the Post-Intelligencer of their orphaned little blond daughter. I don’t mean to imply that I laid eyes on you personally.”

  Voakes’s red-rimmed gaze drifted over Becca, from head to foot. He could see her perfectly well, and a shudder went through her.

  She was rapidly recalculating everything she thought she knew about psychopaths. Most of them had blunt affects, little facial expression or vocal inflection. There was no psychotropic medication for this kind of atavistic madness. But even in his last illness, Voakes was animated, revealing a kind of mild, sneaking enjoyment of this attention. Becca remembered that aspects of the sociopathic brain had more in common with reptiles than humans, and that seemed to fit him perfectly.

  “I haven’t heard you deny
it,” Becca said.

  “I haven’t really heard enough to know if I should deny it.” Voakes sulked for a moment, plucking at the sheet, apparently striving for some combination of pathos and ambiguity. “Why the sudden interest, if I can ask? I mean, you could have asked me about this years ago. You’ve always known where to find me.”

  “I’ve never been interested in finding you, Mr. Voakes, and in five more minutes, I’ll never think of you again,” Becca lied. “We don’t have any way of making you tell us the truth; you’ll either answer me or you won’t. The state of your conscience when you die is entirely up to you. But you need to make this decision, now.”

  Voakes considered this, or pretended to. Becca felt Jo’s strong, breathing presence behind her, and she matched her breath for breath.

  “All right. I’ll tell you the absolute truth, but then you have to do me a favor. Quid pro quo, Clarice. You’d be granting my dying wish.”

  Becca bit back an automatic refusal, acknowledging Emily’s look with a slight nod. “No promises. But I’m listening.”

  “I’ll even go first.” Voakes brightened, showing a flash of that malign merriment. “Then you can decide if you want to grant my last wish or not. The state of your conscience when I die is entirely up to you. Are you ready?”

  Becca waited.

  “I didn’t kill your parents.” Voakes sagged into the bed, color returning to his face. His meds probably contained painkillers that were beginning to kick in. “The police got it right that time. Your mother killed your parents.”

  Becca looked at Jo, whose gaze was fixed on Voakes’s haggard features. She met Becca’s gaze and nodded once. Voakes was telling the truth.

  “Can I have the doll?” Voakes’s eyes were closed, his face turned toward the window, slatted light falling over the bed.

  Vertigo slammed into Becca, and she swayed on her feet. She fought to clear her head with a fierce act of will.

  “That little rag doll you were holding that night. I assume you kept it, such an important family heirloom. I’d like to be cradling it as I fall asleep for the last time. I think it would comfort me.”

  Becca found her voice. “How do you know about the doll, Mr. Voakes?”

  “Oh. You were clutching it in that photo I mentioned, the one in the paper.”

  She looked at Jo again, mostly because she needed to see her in that moment, but also because Jo had made a thorough study of every police report and newspaper article related to the shooting.

  Jo shook her head.

  “Okay, it’s time to wrap this up.” Peter scowled at Emily. “We said fifteen minutes. He’s starting to fade.”

  “What about my dying wish?” Voakes sounded plaintive.

  Becca had had enough. She turned with admirable balance and coordination and walked out of the room. Emily followed her closely, looking ready to perform CPR, if necessary.

  They would debrief with Emily. They would drive back to Capitol Hill. On the way, they would try to explain to each other how Voakes could have seen a doll in a photo that didn’t exist.

  But first Jo stopped in the doorway of the bedroom long enough to speak to John William Voakes for the first time, and pass on her own parting wish.

  “Die soon, and badly.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Bentley purred silently back over the West Seattle Bridge before either of them spoke.

  “Did you watch Oprah Winfrey?” Jo asked.

  Becca pulled her gaze from the downtown skyline looming ahead, the black celery stick of the Columbia Tower, and frowned. “Jo, are we really in the mood for celebrity chat right now?”

  “This is important.” Jo knew one reliable way to comfort Becca was to feed her, but Jo had never learned to cook. She wanted to take her to the best restaurant in the city, but there were two problems with this plan. First, she had only seen Becca consume unhealthy food, and second, Jo didn’t think she could stand one more minute in the company of strangers.

  “All right, sure. I liked Oprah’s show.”

  “Good.” Jo clicked her signal to exit off I-5. “The doll wasn’t a state secret, Becca. Even Pam Emerson mentioned your reaction to a doll that night.”

  “But you said the only photo of me that was ever in a paper was that kindergarten portrait. That was outrage enough. There were never any shots of me holding a doll.”

  “Yes, but Emily Kelley pointed out that we weren’t privy to the conversations that could have happened over the years in a state mental hospital. She told us about the forensic unit at Western, the gossip there. Voakes could easily have heard details about your parents’ deaths any time in the past two decades.”

  “Maybe. What did his face tell you? Did you learn anything?”

  Jo cruised silently through the Central District, trying to find words to describe the extraordinary aberration that was John William Voakes. “I’ve never seen anything like him. According to his expressions, he never lied once.”

  “What?”

  Jo shrugged. “I’m saying that his microexpressions are useless as a means of detecting false statements. Most people show some flicker of guilt when they lie, or at least a fear of getting caught. Your friends are right about you, Becca. You’re too inherently honest. You broadcast lies like a beacon. Voakes has no perception at all that lying is wrong, so there was no guilt or fear. He seemed to be telling the truth when he denied killing your parents. But he gave the same signals when he claimed he saw the picture of the doll in the paper, an outright deception.”

  “Which doesn’t exactly vindicate him.” Becca rested her head against the seat, looking disturbingly spent. “So John William Voakes stays on our list, along with Rachel, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my father. Hell, Jo, maybe I shot the gun myself and blocked it all out. Maybe I thought it was a toy. Two unlucky shots…”

  Jo had actually considered this most horrific of scenarios early on, and dismissed it out of hand. “Becca, you were five years old. They would have to be two incredibly unlucky shots, one after the other. And a five-year-old wouldn’t have the knowledge or presence of mind to stage a murder/suicide.”

  “I was a pretty precocious five-year-old. And where are we going? Oh.”

  Jo waited until Becca’s face lit up, then she sighed in relief. She nodded at the glass doors of Ezell’s Famous Chicken. “I understand Oprah Winfrey announced on her show that Seattle’s Ezell’s had the best fried chicken she ever tasted. I know you like chicken. You wanted some the other night, when Marty and Khadijah came over for the Xenathon, but you suggested going to KFC…” Jo uttered the letters with distaste.

  “You know, Jo?” Becca looked entirely serious, as if she were telling an unvarnished truth. “You can be a very sweet woman. A good friend. I don’t think you give yourself enough credit for that.”

  She unsnapped her seatbelt and leaned over to kiss Jo lightly on the cheek. “Come on. Aren’t you hungry? You’re buying.”

  Jo ducked out of the car, smiling, resting her hand on her cheek.

  *

  Becca had the best intentions of waiting until they had settled in the house and fired up a Xena episode before attacking the chicken, but she made short work of her share on the drive back to the Hill. Some of Jo’s share, too. She didn’t understand how anyone could steer a luxury car while consuming greasy poultry without so much as a smeared lip, but Jo managed it. Becca went through twenty napkins with relish.

  She was growing drowsy by the time they pulled up to the house. The triple punch of a long day, a heart-to-heart with a serial killer, and a full meal had about done her in.

  She saw the wrought iron gates of Lake View Cemetery across the street reflected in the polished glass of the Bentley’s window as Jo keyed off the engine. “You realize I’m using a solid week of vacation leave for this, Jo? We could be at Cannon Beach. We could be at Lake Crescent.” She glanced at Jo and blushed. “I mean, I could be. Just saying, I’ve taken more relaxing vacations.”

  “You
’ll deserve a real break after this.” Jo extended her long arm across the back of the seat and regarded Becca. “You would deserve a luxury vacation, in any case. Seeing Western and meeting Emily Kelley have opened my eyes a bit about your work. You deal with people in crisis every day, and you have for your entire career. I can tell how good you are at what you do, Becca. You were diamond sharp with Voakes, but genuine and warm with Pam’s father. Your compassion comes through so clearly.”

  Becca set off the tiny little vacuum cleaners behind her eyes, not wanting to tear up, hoping to keep Jo in the gentle space she had amazingly created. “Sometimes I think I spend my days applying Band-Aids. The poverty and mental illness and addiction I see in my work seem unbeatable. Feels like all I’ve done is deal with a constant series of mini crises my entire career.”

  “A thousand Band-Aids, a thousand small works of healing that actually helped someone.” Jo shrugged. “Seems like an honorable career to look back on to me.”

  The interior of the Bentley was growing warm in the late afternoon sun. Becca glanced at Jo’s hand on the back of the seat. Her thumb would only have to move a mere inch to brush the back of Becca’s neck. Jo sat motionless, her eyes on the steering wheel, and Becca felt a weary sadness seep into her. This was a woman dealing with a profound disability, and she didn’t have the right, or enough hope right now, to push things further.

  “Listen, I’m bushed.” She gave Jo’s knee a sisterly pat. “I could conk out easily for a nap in that armchair. You have to be tired, too, so I’ll swap you for the couch.”

  Jo slid her arm slowly from the back of the seat and unclasped her belt. “We can fight about it inside.”

  They walked together up the shaded steps to the porch, and Becca found enough energy to be proud of her lack of stomach knot. Dread used to shoot through her at the very sight of this place, and simply walking into it took an act of will. She was besting this house slowly, with Jo’s help, with late-night Xena parties here with her friends. A murderer of a family, a house haunted by tragedy, eating fried chicken in luxury cars. Becca was learning to face down her demons.