He looked out the balcony door at the Marlboro Man. He didn’t seem to have the same fascination with him that I had.
“Tell me about the moon, Jack.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Poet’s moon. You’ve told me the end of the story. What’s the beginning? How does a woman end up at the point we are at now?”
He turned from the door and looked at me, a challenge in his eyes. He was looking for something, anything that he could build a case on for not believing. I cleared my throat before beginning.
“That’s the hard part,” I said. “You should ask Brass.”
“I will. But you try it.”
I thought a moment before starting.
“A young girl, I don’t know, twelve, thirteen years old. She’s abused by her father. Sexually. Her mother either . . . her mother leaves. She either knew what was happening and couldn’t stop it or just didn’t care. The mother leaves and then the girl is left alone with him. He’s a cop. A detective. He threatens her, convinces her she can never tell anyone because he’s a detective and he’ll find out. He tells her she won’t be believed and she believes him.
“So one day she’s finally had enough or she’d had enough all along but didn’t have the chance or hadn’t thought out the right plan. Whatever. But that one day comes and she kills him, makes it look like he did it himself. Suicide. She gets away with it. There’s a detective on the case who knows something isn’t right but what’s he gonna do? He knows the guy had it coming to him. He lets it go.”
Backus was standing in the middle of the room staring at the floor.
“I knew about her father. The official version, I mean.”
“I had a friend find out the details of the unofficial version.”
“What next?”
“What happens next is she blossoms. The power she had in that one moment makes up for a lot of things. She gets past it. Few do, but she makes it. She’s a smart girl and she goes on to the university to study psychology, to learn about herself. And then she even gets drafted by the FBI. She’s a prize and she moves fast through the bureau until she’s in the unit that actually studies people like her father. And like herself. You see, her whole life has been this struggle to understand. And then when her team leader wants to study police suicides he goes to her because he knows the official story about her father. Not the truth. Just the official story. She takes the job, knowing inside that the reason she had been chosen was a sham.”
I stopped there. The more I told of the story the more power I felt. Knowledge of someone’s secrets is an intoxicating power. I reveled in my ability to put the story together.
“And so,” Backus whispered then, “how does it all come apart for her?”
I cleared my throat.
“Things were going good,” I continued. “She married her partner and things were going good. But then things weren’t so good. I don’t know if it was pressure from the job, the memories, the breakup of that marriage, maybe all of those things. But she started coming apart. Her husband left her, thinking that she was empty inside. The Painted Desert, he called her, and she hated him for it. And then . . . maybe she remembered the day when she killed her tormentor. Her father. And she remembered the peace that came after . . . the release.”
I looked at him. He had a far-off look in his eyes, maybe envisioning the story as I conjured it from hell.
“One day,” I continued, “one day a request for a profile comes in. A boy has been killed and mutilated in Florida. The case detective wants a profile of the person who did this. Only she recognizes the detective, knows his name. Beltran. A name from the past. A name maybe brought up in an old interview and she knows that he, too, was a tormentor, an abuser like her father, and that the victim he is calling about was also probably his victim . . .”
“Right,” Backus said, taking up the strand. “So she goes down to Florida to this man, Beltran, and does it again. Just like with her father. Makes it look like a suicide. She even knew where Beltran kept his shotgun hidden. Gladden had told her that. It was probably an easy thing to