The Donzerly Light Read online

  The Donzerly Light

  A Psychological Thriller

  Ryne Douglas Pearson

  Published By Schmuck & Underwood

  © 2010 Ryne Douglas Pearson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the author, except for brief passages used for review purposes.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Visit the author’s website:

  http://www.rynedouglaspearson.com

  Follow the author on Twitter:

  twitter.com/rynedp

  Author’s Note

  Prepare yourself for a journey into the past. Fifteen to twenty years. To a time when cell phones were the oddity and pagers weren’t quite extinct. When phone booths dotted the urban landscape and allowed any Jane or Joe with some spare change to reach out and touch someone. Did I plan this as an homage to a decade dear to my heart?

  Not so much. This novel was written in the mid nineties and was ‘out of my genre’. Translation—my publisher at the time didn’t want it. I ended up publishing another novel that was ‘in my genre’ a couple years later before I started screenwriting, but I’ve always liked this story. A lot. Supernatural mystery and suspense has always been what I love to read, and to write. Now, with the advent of e-books, I can bring The Donzerly Light to you. Sure, I could have updated it and thrown in all the current technology, and reference persons and events and cultural phenomena so that it felt like I wrote it yesterday. But I didn’t, and, you know what—I like that it inhabits a past that isn’t quite gone from our memory.

  Oh. One last thing—I’ve got more of these books squirreled away on the hard drive, so, keep your e-readers handy, because the genre shackles are off.

  Ryne Douglas Pearson, September 2010

  Table Of Contents

  First Interrogation

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Second Interrogation

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Third Interrogation

  Chapter Thirteen

  Fourth Interrogation

  Chapter Fourteen

  Fifth Interrogation

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Sixth Interrogation

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Seventh Interrogation

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Eighth Interrogation

  Chapter Thirty Six

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Ninth Interrogation

  Chapter Forty One

  Chapter Forty Two

  Chapter Forty Three

  Chapter Forty Four

  Tenth Interrogation

  Chapter Forty Five

  Chapter Forty Six

  Chapter Forty Seven

  Chapter Forty Eight

  Final Interrogation

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About The Author

  Part One

  Mutton Or Wool

  First Interrogation

  August 14...11:20 p.m.

  His hands had been cuffed and his eyes taped over for several hours when he heard footsteps approach the small space in which he was being held. A closet, he was certain, having tested its limits while stretching his good right leg, probing walls and a door from where he lay half curled in a corner. His left leg, casted from just below the knee to just above the toes, was throbbing against its plaster confines, sending dull bolts of pain up to his hip in a sickening, precise rhythm mated to the beating of his heart. It was pain verging on agony, but that Jay Grady could handle. He’d endured far, far worse a hundred times over.

  The footsteps—two sets, Jay thought—stopped just outside. A latch clicked, the door opened. Four hands lifted him from the cold floor and half carried, half dragged him out and away from the closet. Beyond the heavy tape that masked his eyes, Jay could sense brightness. The cold glow of artificial light. Not the warm touch of a rising sun—a warmth he wanted to know again. But he wondered. He wondered if he ever would.

  The men—they had to be male, Jay figured from the force of their grip on his upper arms—said nothing as they moved him down what must have been a corridor, the pain in his left leg making him wince as his cast slid along a long, hard floor. They made one turn to the left and stopped soon after that. Another door opened and Jay was taken into a space with much more depth than the closet, and a brightness more cold, more intense than that in the unseen halls he had just traveled.

  A room. He was in a room.

  The strong hands put him in a straight-back chair and slid the seat, with Jay in it, up to something that touched him about the stomach. An edge. A table edge. He was sitting at a table.

  He had been made to sit at a table.

  The hands that had gripped him withdrew, and he heard footsteps move away, back into the hall. The door closed.

  Only then did Jay hear the breathing.

  He ‘looked’ around, turning his head this way and that, facing all directions except directly behind. The breathing seemed to be coming from straight ahead, from a few feet distant, if that. Across the table. Someone was directly across the table from him.

  The sound of paper came next. Loose pages being turned over from a stack just across the table. Fifteen seconds or so elapsed between each hushed scrape. Whoever was breathing was also reading.

  “Who...” Jay swallowed, still able to taste the blood from the open welt on the soft flesh inside his lip, still feeling the grit of the earth clinging to his cheek where it had been forced hard to the ground, a knee pressed against the back of his neck. That was some hours ago. The past. Jay ran his tongue over the open wound inside his mouth and made himself focus on the present. The dark, uncertain moment that was now. “Who’s there?”

  “Quiet, please,” a man said calmly, but firmly. Not an old voice, not a young voice.

  “Just please tell me who—”

  “If you cannot be quiet, I will have you gagged.”

  Jay swallowed the remainder of his plea and ‘stared’ toward the voice.

  “Do I make myself clear?”

  Spent physically, mentally, emotionally, his ability, his desire to protest gone, Jay acquiesced with a feeble nod. His head bowed. The throb in his left leg raced with the beat of his heart.

  “When I want to hear from you, I’ll speak to you,” the man said, and that was that. The only sound for more than an hour was his breath and the slow rustle of pages turning.

  August 15...12:36 a.m.

  Jay was beginning to doze, a dream of Mari rising like a heat shimmer in his subco
nscious, when several sharp raps on the table cut short the coming of her pleasant, hazy visage, and snapped him back to the darkness of his waking world.

  “What?” Jay asked, his head swinging left, then right, then the gentle hush of breathing drew his attention that way. “What is it?”

  “Murder, Mr. Grady,” a voice said. It was the man. The man who’d demanded his silence earlier.

  “Murder?” Jay parroted, momentarily disoriented. But very soon his thoughts centered and he remembered what near-sleep had masked for so brief a time. “You mean—”

  “Murder is a serious matter, Mr. Grady.”

  “Listen, you have to—”

  “The intentional killing of another human being,” the man interrupted, as if his were the only words of consequence. It seemed a natural part of his manner. “Do you know what the punishment for murder is in Missouri?”

  Jay sniffed the air. It was stale. Old building stale. “Am I still in Missouri?”

  “You are.”

  “I wasn’t sure. I was in a trunk for an hour, two hours. I don’t know. All I know is the road was lousy.”

  “Your confinement was necessary.”

  Jay brought his cuffed hands up from his lap and touched the tape over his eyes. “Is this still necessary?”

  A contemplative quiet hung in the air for a moment, then the man said, “Lean over this way.”

  Jay did, rising slightly out of the chair on his good leg. He felt the rasp of calloused fingers at his temple, then a quick sting across his face as the tape was ripped away. His eyes were instantly dazzled by a bright pulse of light that lasted, and he fell back the short distance to the chair. He blinked rapidly, his face cast slightly down from the overhead lights that seemed grotesquely brilliant. But with each flutter of his lids his eyes adjusted to the very ordinary radiance thrown from the twin fluorescent fixtures mounted on the ceiling, and soon Jay was able to tolerate the light. Squinting somewhat, he looked to the man who had been only a voice until then.

  “Better?”

  Jay nodded and considered the man opposite him. Whoever he was, time had gone easy on him. He was maybe fifty, but there was just a light dusting of gray on the brown hair about his temples, and fine, spiny fissures in the tanned skin at the corners of his blue eyes—the second bluest eyes Jay had ever seen. Blue eyes that bore at him, a thousand things brooding behind the stare.

  And then there were his hands. Resting before the man as fists atop a thick manila file folder, each was a meaty cudgel at the end of massive, chiseled forearms, which themselves sprouted from biceps that ballooned the cuffs of the T-shirt he wore. Taken whole, his hands and arms seemed to step toward shoulders as wide and solid as an anvil.

  Jay gazed at those hands, recalling the roughness of the fingers on his temple. Reliving for an instant the calloused touch. These were hands that knew contact, that knew work of some kind. Hands that could strike. Fingers that might crush.

  Jay wondered if he was going to die.

  “What about these?” Jay asked, glancing at the black steel cuffs that bound his wrists together.

  The man shook his head. “You’re a cold-blooded murderer, Mr. Grady. Your victim was unarmed. I watched you do it.”

  Jay let his hands settle to his lap. “Who are you?”

  “You can call me Mr. Wright.”

  The reply puzzled Jay briefly, his brow furrowing, but soon he found sense in it and the skin above his tired brown eyes smoothed. “’Mister’”, is it? Not ‘officer’ or ‘agent’?”

  “You weren’t expecting a Miranda warning, were you?” Mr. Wright grinned at his prisoner, and from somewhere below the table he retrieved a small notebook and put it near the thick file. A pen was clipped to its brown cover. “I don’t know your experience, Mr. Grady, but no lawman I know has the power to blindfold someone and throw them in the trunk of a car.”

  “But you do?”

  Mr. Wright nodded. “I have the power to do a great many things.”

  “Such as kill me,” Jay offered, trying to sound defiant in spite of the wet, fearful ball rolling down his throat.

  “If I choose,” Mr. Wright answered without hesitation. “There are plenty of out of the way places in this state to dispose of a body. The brushy banks of some stream, or in a rocky gully somewhere. Countless places. And, maybe ten years from now, some hunter will step over a log and put one of his LL Beans through your rib cage. Into your bones, Mr. Grady. Birds will have picked you clean of meat long before then.”

  So casually, so knowledgeably did this Mr. Wright speak of such matters that Jay could imagine very clearly a magpie plucking his eyes from their sockets and making a meal of them. Could hear the keawwing of a flock circling ever closer to his remains. He could see this and more, and he thought how odd it was to finally glimpse a death that was his own.

  “I could kill you, Mr. Grady. This very moment if I so choose. I’d simply be saving the ‘Show Me’ state the expense of a trial.” Mr. Wright let his fists open so they laid flat upon the file. “But I want you to live—at least for a while.”

  “Why?”

  Mr. Wright tapped the file twice with one stout finger. “You’ve led an interesting life, Mr. Grady. I’ve done some reading about you.”

  Jay eyed the file and tried to ignore the hands. “What’s in there?”

  “Everything about one Jay Marcus Grady. Newspaper articles, magazine articles...” Jay looked away from the file now and stared at a bare spot on the tabletop as his captor went on. “...police reports, school records, SEC filings, passport application, medical history, birth certificate, financial statements, etcetera, etcetera.” Mr. Wright grinned. “Amazing the amount of information that a single thumb print from a murder weapon can lead one to.”

  Jay breathed hard through his nose and said nothing.

  “Yes, you have led a very interesting life, Mr. Grady,” Mr. Wright said again, then opened the file and removed a sheet of paper. He slid it toward Jay and spun it his way. It was a photocopy of a New York Times article, with a photo accompanying the story. A somewhat grainy photo of a younger Jay Grady, smiling smartly and dressed the part of the sophisticated businessman. “Hell of a suit. You looked good. What kind was it?”

  Jay didn’t need to look long. A glance brought it back. That time. That moment. A bleak, wintry pall clutched his heart. “Armani.”

  Mr. Wright turned the copy back his way and took it in hand. He examined it casually. “Very, very interesting. Tell me, how old were you in this picture?”

  “It says in the article.”

  “Refresh my memory,” Mr. Wright said, glancing sharply over the top of the paper at Jay.

  “I was twenty four.” A lifetime ago, Jay thought, though on the rare occasions when that time did come back to him, whether in dreams or in moments of unguarded rumination, it seemed another life entirely.

  “Pretty fucking dapper,” Mr. Wright commented, then slipped the paper back into the file. Something about his expression, his manner, seemed to change. It settled somewhere toward wonder as he ogled Jay, his head cocking slightly. Maybe a stone’s throw from disdain, as well. “And look at you now. Eight years later. Look at Jay Marcus Grady.” He snickered. “Things sure have changed, haven’t they?”

  Again, Jay had nothing to say.

  “You see, this is what I find so fascinating: the change.” Mr. Wright eased back where he sat and crossed his arms. They looked like fleshy pythons entwined across his chest. “Eight years ago you’re the hottest stock broker on Wall Street. Newsweek called you the Street’s wunderkind. You’re picking stocks that no one else will touch. Low grade stuff that, lo and behold, goes through the roof after you pick it. Stop me if I’m getting any of this wrong, will you?” He smiled wryly at his prisoner, then went on. “Again and again you did this. You were mucho hot, my friend. You made a load of money. You were the kid with the Midas touch. On top of the fucking world.” Mr. Wright quieted for a moment, then shook his head at the man
who was avoiding his stare. “And here you are now in some dirtwater town in a nowhere state, about as far from Wall Street, as far from that life as you can get without going to the moon. You’re a fucking nobody here, unremarkable except for the fact that you’re a murderer.” A little chuckle slipped from Mr. Wright and Jay looked up.

  “You must find this really amusing,” Jay observed coldly, his tone edged.

  Mr. Wright leaned forward to the table and shoved the file toward Jay. It stopped just before him, some of its contents avalanching free of the folder. “I find it interesting, Mr. Grady. The transformation. The ‘why’. The ‘how’. How you ended up here. And why you murdered someone.”

  Jay glanced at the file. “You’ve got this. I’m sure you can put it all together.”

  “A man’s life can’t be documented in a few hours. Not all of it. You can only go back so far. Still, maybe I could, as you say, put it all together. Maybe not. Either way, I think that there are some things only you can tell me. Things that aren’t on paper anywhere. We’re in Missouri, Grady; you can’t show me, so tell me. Tell me how you went from there to here, from then to now.”

  Jay swallowed and looked hard at Mr. Wright. “Who are you? How did you know to find me?”

  “I’m not the one here to answer questions.”

  “Why should I answer yours?”

  “Because I am the only hope you have. I am your judge and jury. I can be your executioner.”

  Death, Jay thought, feeling old, hollow echoes pulse deep within. Not so long ago he’d wished for death to befall him. Now it was sitting across from him and could be his for less than the asking. All he had to do was nothing. Not speak, not tell, not share of his life. This life and the other one. So easy. So easy to just let it happen.

  But now, in this place, this time, this life, he wanted death to come as a scalpel, killing not all that he was, but rather excising the parts of his two lives that burned like caustic tumors in his soul. To break the chains of memory that bound him to old and horrible wounds.

  He wanted to live. The desire was still alien to him. It had been so long since he’d done anything more than accept each day as his eyes opened after sleep. Since he’d actually longed to see the next day come. But now he craved the tomorrows that his life might hold. The next day, the new sunrise. The one after that. And the one after that. He wanted those. Yes, he did want to live. To put all that had happened behind. To forget.