The Third Twin: A Dark Psychological Thriller Read online

  “Dad . . . I know the man with the elephant head. In the square he called me ‘little treasure.’ Just like . . . just like he did Kathy. Kathy-chen, he said. He was there, hiking on the trail when we were collecting leaves for the science project. The day Kathy disappeared.”

  I had fallen back against the wall, and long before the last sentence had found its way out. My heart was thundering in my chest. My entire body felt as though it was encased in dry ice. I tried but failed to deliver the words that she must have needed desperately right then, after waking from this revelation. But there was only one outlet for the roiling, thunderous cloud that had descended, and that was the door. I told her to stay put and was out of the room that quickly.

  As I ran down the corridor, turning left into another before bursting out of the hotel entrance, fragments of a puzzle I knew would somehow continue to make no sense as a whole began to click into place. Its central point of reference: Germany. I didn’t need to review my limited Deutsch to know the Germans attached chen to names, particularly their daughters’, as an endearment. Was it another coincidence this costume party attendee, on a separate continent, had used the same pet name? No. He had made a point of being around. Toss in lyrics, strange dreams, magazine ads, and you had a medley to match my tossing emotions as I raced around the far end of the hotel next door to ours. Heading for the rear of the garden, where the elephant man-thing’s voice had indicated he was moving. Whatever reasons someone might have for terrorizing us, when I got my hands around the creature’s throat I may not wait for an answer before I choked the goddamned life out of him.

  The drive I’d entered ended at a chained gate. I climbed over the gate, and by the light of a paneled outdoor lamp found the nearest path, which I followed on soft but hurried feet until I was surrounded by darkness. Pausing to let my eyes adjust, I discerned the silhouettes of a bench and another lamp, this one burned out, at an intersection ahead. I listened for a moment before proceeding to the brief open area, where I ignored a sense of vulnerability as I stood stock still, tuning in to every whisper in the foliage around me. When after a minute or two none of those whispers hinted at human passage, I began to silently work my way back toward the hotel. As I did, each step seemed to have occurred before it was taken, a blending of the detachment that had followed me outside and the déjà vu that seemed to have taken up residence, surfacing at will. In spite of this quality between myself and my environment, I remained alert to any odd sound. The fact that I hadn’t already detected one was discouraging, as the garden was only so big. But there were also only so many possibilities I could have lost the man to. One, he’d made it out of the garden before I arrived at the gate. Two, he was staying at the hotel next to ours (he couldn’t have entered without a key). Three, he’d changed direction, either circling around toward the hotel on the other side of ours or—my beating heart fell out of stroke at the thought—reversing his tracks completely.

  By now I’d entered the glow radius of what I judged to be one of the lamps standing along the rim of the garden behind the Campestre. A good time for it, as the light enabled my body to keep pace with my racing mind, which was no longer concerned with the noise I made. I navigated the remainder of the garden as quickly as the maze would allow, the path depositing me almost directly upon the patio of the room next to mine and Kristin’s. I took two steps in the only direction that mattered, and froze. For the second time in a ten-minute segment of my life, I found myself the audience of a blood-chilling phantasmagoria, this time assisted in its effect by a moving, rotating light that must have belonged to a patrol or utility vehicle sweeping up the after-party streets.

  The elephantine shadows stretched like bands of elastic across patio and yard as their source loomed over my daughter. Both door and curtains had been cast wide, offering the intermittent image of Kristin’s clamped, horror-stricken face. The elephant head canted not toward the long hunting knife held at her throat, not toward the shining memory that lived in the knife’s blade, but in the direction of the witness to the attack. In the presence of such a tableau, all considerations, however pertinent, become instantaneously extraneous, shedding away like shock ripples from the central burning force of fatherhood. Even so, it takes a moment for paralyzed muscles to act on signals from the brain, long enough for an elephant head to lean close to a girl’s ear and for that girl to recoil in terror, thrashing among the covers.

  I found my legs as he found his, meeting him full-charge as he leaped out of the room by the same way he had entered. He got no further than the stoop as I slammed his body into the doubled panels of the open door, showering my screaming daughter in glass. I am a reasonably strong man, but it was almost with ease that I secured a position astride him, jamming my forearm into his throat and pinning his arms to the floor with my knees; almost with cooperation that I twisted the knife out of his incapacitated hand; almost with hunger that his flesh accepted the blade, which I continued driving under his ribs—though it had reached its hilt, though his spasms had waned—until Kristin’s screaming stopped.

  She was limp as I pulled her up into my arms.

  “Kristin, baby. Kristin,” I urged, shaking her. As I held her face in my hand, looking into glassed-over eyes, a thought made its insidious way to the surface, a prospect as unjustified as it was unbidden, considering the duration of her screams. And still I found myself tilting her head back, swallowing back the rising gorge at the memory of another delicate throat that had known the cold edge of a knife. I would not look at first, could not bring myself to validate by further action the notion that he had given Kristin, like Kathy, more than the gift of words when he leaned to her. Then, working against the muscles of my tightly closed eyes, I lifted my left, then my right eyelid.

  I turned away, hyperventilating—

  Then sucked it all back in as I saw the attacker slowly rise to his hands and knees, wavering a moment before steadying himself and pushing to his feet. He stood in profile, relative to my position on the bed, knife hilt protruding at a downward angle from beneath his ribs, butler tuxedo shirt saturated red. Again he rocked as I clutched my daughter to my chest with one arm, held the other poised to launch me from the bed. Again he steadied himself, then reached up and took the top of his hood in his fist. He pulled it slowly, pausing when his balance faltered, resuming when he’d found his inner ear again. It was an agonizing experience for the beholder, who wanted so to see this man’s face even as he wanted to see him crumple in a heap, forever. But at last the grim task saw fruition, the head tumbling to the floor with a padded thump, leaving behind the separate collar-like piece that had helped support the now demolished Styrofoam arms.

  He appeared to be Latin, certainly not German, his face middle-aged, darkly handsome. It wore a peaceful expression, though he heaved slightly as he tried to speak from it. The word came on bubbles of blood, and in its native form, but it was enunciated clearly enough that I was able to decipher the sum of its syllables.

  Evolución was how it came out, though my mind didn’t discount that a first letter r might have been lost in the effort.

  With that utterance, he turned and stumbled out the door. He made it to the end of the patio before dropping, for good.

  4

  The ensuing weeks would prove to be the worst of my fifty-one years of living, to include those surrounding Kathy’s murder. They began with a statement, a strange statement from Felicia’s lips, and ended in death and institutionalization. The period between was a blur of doctors, specialists, and investigators, whose paths, collectively, led essentially nowhere. Some answers were found, but only where there was the raw material to work from. The creature that had glutted himself on the slow brutalization of my family would remain the elephantine shadow upon all of our souls.

  Felicia’s statement came after a visit with one of the more mainstream of the above mentioned specialists, a psychiatrist who dealt specifically with trauma patients. She’d flown in from Anchorage to review Kristin’s case
and had made little headway in penetrating the shell that had formed. A crack was to appear soon enough, though, with no one’s help but Felicia’s and my own. At least to the extent that the mother in Kristin was concerned. She would not address what happened in Brazil until it had more than addressed her, in the form of a sustained barrage of scream-level nightmares.

  The revelation came as we sat on my living room couch one evening, after putting Kristin into the only bed she would sleep in for a while to come, myself dispossessed into a cot that I placed practically within arm’s reach of the mattress I normally slept on. But when it came, it came spontaneously, and with impact. Aside from any subtler implications—and I was as susceptible as Felicia when it came to the moment—the news could only add to Kristin’s emotional instability. I remember the frame in time, the coffee mug passing from my hand to Felicia’s, its steam rising around her mouth as she hesitated, lower lip quivering slightly, before uttering the strange words.

  “Her hymen wasn’t broken, Barry.”

  “What?” I was not sure I had heard—but yes, I had as I felt a nerve twitch in the back of my neck.

  “Her hymen.” Her head tilted oddly to the side as though it was on strings. “It wasn’t broken.”

  “Just what are you saying, Felicia? I’m no expert, but isn’t it true that sometimes the hymen isn’t broken . . . ?”

  “The OB mentioned it to Dr. Whittler. She said that while it is not uncommon for intercourse to occur without the hymen breaking, it would have seemed highly unlikely in Kristin’s case because of the way she’s built down there. That it was a wonder she hadn’t broken it at some point during childhood—it being that fragile. Meanwhile Kristin, unbeknownst to me, told Dr. Whittler that she didn’t believe she’d had sex that night. He actually had to convince her she could not trust her memory, given the circumstances. The impression he had, though, was that her belief was not based in memory, but in instinct. You know what high regard Dr. Whittler has for Kristin. He took it upon himself to talk to the boy, who happens to be a patient of his, and came in for a physical a few days later. The boy admitted under the threat of his parents’ involvement that he had lied by omission. He claimed the rumor had been started by someone else, and he’d let it go to look cool among his friends. He and the other kids with them that night hadn’t even been around after they put her in bed to sleep it off. The others could vouch for him, he said. They left her passed out in the house where they had been partying and went out cruising.”

  “If the others could vouch for the fact that he wasn’t there,” I said, taking firm hold of reason against whatever the underlying suggestion—aliens? immaculate conception?—“then just which friends was this punk looking cool for? That doesn’t even make sense, Felicia. Did Whittler tell him Kristin was pregnant? The kid was probably trying to squirm out of responsibility. What the hell was Dr. Whittler doing talking to him in the first—”

  The sentence met a wall as I watched her eyes suddenly widen, fixing on a point to her left.

  There in the hall doorway stood Kristin, the ghost of life in her eyes for the first time since our return. But only for as long as the billowy tongues took to register. They subsided as we watched, essence-ing out with her quietly vented words, “I knew that bastard was lying.”

  The flickers seemed to want to rise again as the three of us painted our forsaken triangle, then my daughter, soul of my soul, simply turned around and walked back down the hall.

  “Go after her,” Felicia said, voice, expression, manner all still in that puppet place. “Tell her . . . how much we love her.”

  ***

  Others would look at Kristin, other opinions would be expressed—not about the hymen matter, whose bubble of secrecy, thank God, would expand no further than Whittler and Mallory—but to be honest, I scarcely noticed after a while. Had Kristin shown any kind of intensity of emotion, other than in little offshoots of that initial crack, I would not have permitted them to probe her. But hope is a contagion, and I subsisted off Felicia’s there at the beginning. Even at that early stage, though, what germs transferred from my ex-wife to me on the way to these appointments were gone by the time we returned from them, having been sucked up into the buzz of postulations and advice that filled in for action. Eventually I had no preconceptions. Quite the contrary.

  Somehow in the midst of the futile appointments, the follow-up phone calls to Brazil, the sleepless nights managing Kristin’s nightmares, the ensuring she was fed, I found the time to ask myself—I couldn’t depend on anyone else—just what the hell had happened. I had killed a man, that was certain. He had killed one of my daughters and terrorized another; this seemed indisputable. The authorities in Nevada and California were not ready to close the Tahoe case based on the notion that a single knife-armed man fond of bestowing the German pet name ‘little treasure’ had been responsible for both crimes. Which was fine with me, as my whole point in abandoning my daughter for two days and flying down to Reno-Tahoe was to encourage them to leave the case open toward the purpose of determining who the culprit was. Where had he come from? What had been his motives? Thus far the investigation in Brazil had uncovered nothing, including the man’s identity. That he was Latin was about all they seemed to know.

  Which led to another question, one that floated out on the fringes of scientific investigation: What were the odds that I would choose a carnival festival in the part of the world he originated from? Sure, there were millions of Latin Americans on both sides of the Canal, and he could have followed us wherever we’d gone, but he’d been in his element there; it was his culture, at least in a racial sense. Within said element he had found his way into our psyches with a familiar image. He’d demonstrated knowledge, I was now convinced, that I myself had not possessed before Kristin confessed it to me. To take this fanciful thought process a step further, when events were considered as a whole there was almost the hint of orchestration about them—right up to the very end, when he seemed to willingly let me plunge the knife in. While personal decision had obviously gone into my choosing that particular festival among carnival’s many, that particular hotel with its convenient garden into which to lure a father away from his daughter, how could I know such decisions had not been deliberately influenced? It wasn’t as if the propensity for intent hadn’t been established, with the Monty Python routine. How could I know the brochure I’d discovered in an airport, the one that had brought the Spider Festival to my attention, hadn’t been dropped there purposely, like the magazine with the Bavarian excursion ad? In fact, I couldn’t be sure it hadn’t actually been Hotel Rio Campestre’s brochure, or that the hotel hadn’t at least been advertised in the leaflet. It had not been until later that I’d found a use for the information, long after I had glanced over the brochure then tossed it in the bin at the airport. It sounded extreme, but the coincidences had been piling up like pancakes from the griddle, and where there were pancakes, there was someone holding a spatula. But to what end?

  I managed not to spend too much precious time in this arena, for fear of joining my daughter in hers. Trauma could play tricks on the mind. I knew that. Just as I knew that a more reasonable line of thinking went something like this: A psychopath who’d read one of my books and by some pretzel logic come away with an evolution or revolution fixation had targeted my family as the means of seeing his fantasies through. I didn’t care how many psychopaths ran loose in the world, I in no way doubted that the two separate crimes against my family were related. I would give, very reluctantly, that it was theoretically possible two separate attackers were involved, but it was as far as I would bend. There were simply too many questions to be writing things off because they did not fit the template. As with all families, victims to tragedy, ours needed closure. I needed closure, and a nameless body in the morgue wasn’t doing that.

  Thus, I made a decision, to dedicate myself to pursuing the answers to these questions, to not stop until I learned why. Not only was this the only way to true closure
, it was quite possibly the only way to my daughter’s full recovery. Perhaps not this year, but the next. Perhaps not in her teens, but in her twenties. At some point the wounds were going to have to scar over, entirely, leaving only the phantom itches. Already she had shown it wasn’t going to be an easy road. There had been a moment in Tago, in the police station, when the one question I had allowed them to ask her had lured her in hysteria out of her shell. She had referred to her attacker in the present tense. “He will kill me if I tell!” Though I tried, after the outburst, to get through to her that he was dead, that I had personally killed him and he wasn’t coming back, the shell had already reestablished itself, and twice as thick for its momentary failure.

  As I gathered what little there was in the way of raw material in my effort to fulfill my oath to myself, I longed desperately for the answer to what the attacker had told Kristin when he had leaned to her ear.

  I was not going to compromise my daughter to that end, though.

  The question itself had become a potential trigger, and one I would not pull no matter how far along the road to recovery she was. She would tell me when she was ready. If that never happened, so be it.

  Meanwhile, the most tangible thing I had to work with was the elephant suit. It was an astronomically long shot, but that’s where I would begin my search. If he had deemed it a useful and meaningful device, then so would I.