Current Issue

Home

Kate Thornton lives in Southern California where she works for a defense contractor and manages a household of husband, two dogs and three cats. She is retired from the US Army after 22+ years of teaching Counterintelligence. With over 60 short stories in print, she now enjoys writing short fiction in the mystery and science fiction genres. She would love to have you visit at http://www.sff.net/people/katethornton.

The Eyes Never Change by Kate Thornton

The first time I saw Cara Watson, she was four years old, staring gravely at the blood-spattered body of her mother's dead boyfriend. The corpse of Daryl Smit was about two feet from her serious little face, and the toe of her pink tennis shoe was just touching his out-flung hand. She looked up at me with those wide eyes and didn't say a word.

I wondered what she was thinking. Did she remember Daryl's incessant animal rages, the shouting, the brutal obscenities? Did she think about the apartment, bitterly cold since the gas had been turned off, the filthy carpet littered with the broken remains of cheap furniture and the stains of decaying fast food? Did she think about her mother, a sullen, flabby woman, the human equivalent of a kicked stray, led out through the stinking hallway by another detective and a uniform, Daryl's handiwork visible on her puffed face and bruised arms.

Or maybe she was thinking about warm clothes, hot dinner, and sleeping securely. I don't know. The Social Service woman took her away and I didn't see her again for a long time.

Tannie Watson was convicted of manslaughter later that year and did a few years in the women's lockup at St. Genevieve over near the border. Tannie had stabbed Daryl sixteen times with a kitchen knife from Target while he was passed out, but the DA didn't go for murder because premeditation is hard to prove when both parties are as whacked-out as Tannie and Daryl. But what goes around comes around, and Tannie found another loser to hook up with. She died of an overdose three months to the day after being released, pregnant with her fourth child.

I don't know what happened to her other kids––maybe they were adopted into fine families and are now exemplary citizens, making the world a safer and better place to live. Or maybe they got caught in the social nightmare of the foster care system and are spending time on the streets or incarcerated for their crimes. It doesn't much matter to me, as I never met them.

But Cara––there's a different case. I still see that little four-year-old face looking out of the bottomless eyes of an innocent who has seen way too much. I still see that little foot, nearly treading on Daryl Smit's dead hand.

Cara Watson spent most of her childhood in the Charles Foster Home. The couple who ran the place made a living out of the state-funded chore of raising the unwanted. The bare necessities were met, inspections were passed and checks were cashed, but there was nothing in the foster care contracts that mandated any real interest in the kids. They were treated like a small herd of mismatched animals.

Cara ran away at thirteen, after being molested by her foster father and three of her foster brothers, but no one ever bothered to go after her. The holes in the social service system were big enough for whole families to disappear, so one kid more or less wasn’t significant. There was another to take her place before the week was out.

While Cara's replacement at the Foster Home was being broken in, she was on the street turning tricks. When I saw her later at a murder scene, she was older but her eyes had that same grave look.

You couldn't tell right off what the murder weapon had been or even what the corpse had been. It looked like a case of strawberry jam had exploded in that alley, globules of red gore hanging on the blackened bricks, turning brown as I stood there. The smell was that same sick-sweet smell that no amount of Vicks on the inside of your nose can help. I looked around. The white things were bone shards.

Cara was standing back in the crowd, just looking. Her eyes were rimmed with too much makeup, but they were the same wide, serious eyes that I'd seen at the first murder scene. I let the uniforms and the guys from the 70th Precinct handle it. I didn't have any real business there––I just happened to be in the neighborhood and a uniform I knew flagged me down. I don’t know why they thought I might want to take a look at something like that––didn’t they think I got enough?

Anyway, I started to push through the crowd toward her. She didn't see me at first, and kept staring at the mess on the bricks. When she looked up, there was no recognition there, just the look a hooker gives a cop when she knows she's going to be hassled. It always shakes me to see that look on a kid.

She disappeared before I could get to her, melted away into the crowd that was now held back by yellow tape. The tech van pulled up and I got out of everyone's way. Cara Watson. Who would've thought?

I nearly forgot about it until the following week. Coop over at the 70th called about the hit in the alley. They’d ID'd the pieces as one Morton Claypool, small-time crook. He'd been in and out of juvy and the joints over the last few years, strictly small-time. "Jesus," Coop said, "we had a hell of a time just gettin' a name––there wasn't nothing left of him but the ends of his legs and his feet. I heard they collected teeth off the street, ID'd him from that."

I shook my head. "What was it?" I asked. "Bomb?"

"Sorta." Coop looked a little confused. He wasn't the brightest bulb on the tree, but he was a good, honest cop. Well, as honest as you could find in the 70th, anyway. "They say he was blown up from the inside, like he swallowed a bomb or somethin'."

"Swallowed a bomb?" I asked incredulously. "Who'd swallow a goddam bomb?"

"I dunno, Captain," Coop said. "People do the damnedest things."

Coop was right. People do the damnedest things. But bomb-swallowing was a new one on me. Not my idea of a nifty suicide. Bombs are not the size of an aspirin, and how would you detonate something like that? Murder might be more likely––only why? Wouldn't a simple knife or gun get you the same answer to that big question? Whatever this was, I was glad it wasn't on my watch or my turf. Let the 70th have it.

About a month later I got called out on one in my own neighborhood. A hotel maid had found this one, a guy about twenty or so strung up in the shower, the bathtub below neatly plugged. The bathtub held about three inches of blood––no surprise as the guy was covered over every inch with tiny little x's etched deeply into the skin. Even the bugged-out eyeballs and the skin around the mouth that held a rubber ball gag tied in with a piece of elastic showed the marks of a fine knife. He had bled to death, hands and feet tied with the same elastic that held the gag in place and another piece hoisting him up onto the shower spout.

The guy had checked into the place the previous evening with no luggage. The lobby emptied out as I stood around, and I recognized a few of the working girls before they split. The hotel was only slightly classier than the hot-sheet joint around the corner. I checked the register, talked to the maid and the manager, and let the tech guys do the scene. I came back to write up my notes and found Coop waiting.

"Looks like a bondage deal gone wrong," Coop opined over coffee. "I seen 'em even worse than that, damn kinks gettin' their weirdo kicks. Whatta mess."

"Bondage deal, huh?" I asked. Well, that would make it slightly easier to close. Interview a few of the hookers, talk to the right one, ascertain the guy wanted it––and more––and send it on up the food chain. An accident, sorta. Happened all the time in that part of town. Mostly suffocation, though. First one I'd seen cut up like that. "So, any news on your bomb-swallower?"

"Yeah," Coop replied. "Some nice person opened his guts and put a little grenade or something in there. They couldn't have been too far away when he blew. Couldn't determine cause of death, only the ME's guessing no one could have planted the thing in his belly with him sitting and watching, so he's guessing the guy was out cold or already dead first. We got some of the explosives fragments and forensics is trying to trace 'em. Good luck, says I."

"What about the guy––any enemies?"

Coop laughed. "No friends, that's for sure. I musta interviewed a dozen people, every one of them wanted Morton Claypool dead. Every one of them was delighted to hear about it. He was small-time, but a real piece of shit. Had a little racket going over in the sewing district. Used to pick out some little immigrant girlie every few weeks and force her into his truck for some boom-boom. Threatened to tell Immigration if she squawked. A couple of them complained, but after they disappeared, the complaints stopped. Dunno what happened to them––can't get too much out of the old lady over there."

As much as I liked Coop, I knew he couldn't get water out of a fire hose. Good thing for the city there were some smart guys over at the 70th, too.

He put a file on my desk. "Thought you might wanna read up on it––copy of the file for your bedtime pleasure." Nice sense of humor, Coop has. Pictures in loving detail and non-living color and the ME's report, too.

"Thanks, Coop," I said with a grin. I knew what he wanted. "I'll have a copy of this new one for you in a couple of days." Coop had a little collection of bondage photos, mostly the suffocation ones. I knew he'd want a set of my latest.

I looked through Morton Claypool's folder. I wasn't into the photos like Coop, so I put those toward the back and started reading the bio and interview sheets. I was halfway through the first sheet when it jumped off the page at me. Morton Claypool was a graduate of the Charles Foster Home, Cara Watson's alma mater. Not too much of a coincidence, as most of the graduates of the home ended up on my blotter in some form or another. But the dates were right––they had done time there together. And I saw her at the murder scene. Maybe someone needed to look her up and see what she knew.

I reached for the telephone to call Coop, but I knew what he'd say––he'd tell me to go knock myself out. If I had that kind of spare time, I was welcomed to investigate his murders. I smiled.

While I was trying to get a line on Cara, the results from the prelim on the hotel guy came in. He was identified as Bobby Suggs, a petty thief who sometimes crossed over into assault. Cause of death was blood loss and the ME thought the weapon might have been a scalpel or an Exacto knife. And it had been slow, too. According to the ME circumstances suggested accidental death during bondage sex. I read down the quick sheet: contents of wallet, clothes on the bed, yadayada, then I reread the last known address. Charles Foster Home. Maybe it was time for a little visit to the place from where so many of our city's finest young citizens had graduated to the small-time. I pocketed the address and updated the in/out board.

It was a short drive out to the rundown suburb where most houses sported blue plastic tarps over worn-out roofs and yards were hardpan dirt and litter. I drove slowly up Bellevue Drive, a fancy name for a potholed single lane. The two-story dilapidation I remembered wasn't there. In its place was a burned-out shell and a yard piled with broken and singed debris.

A skinny kid on a razor scooter eyed me with disgust.

"What happened here?" I asked.

The kid screwed his face up even more. Funny how ugly kids can get. "Burned down," he growled at me as if I was some kind of moron.

"Yeah, I can see that," I said in my best here-kid-have-some-candy voice. "When?"

"Coupla weeks ago." He got on his scooter and rode off before I could mention how bad his skinhead looked on a ten-year-old. Oh, well.

When I got back to my desk I checked the records on the fire and learned that a fire of undetermined origin had gutted the place. There had been twelve children and the couple who ran the joint in residence at the time, but only an old man and a dog were home when the blaze broke out. I phoned a friend over at the station and he told me it had almost certainly been an electrical fire and when would people learn. Place was a firetrap and the fuse box was almost a hundred years old. "Pennies! They had pennies in that box. What's the matter with people like that?" I couldn't say––what wasn't the matter? "Oh, hang on." He had been digging through a file or something. “Wait, here it is. Yeah. The old man died of smoke inhalation. Looks like he was passed out or something and nobody went back in for him."

"You got an ID?" I asked.

"Yeah, it's right here," he said. "Foster. Charles Foster."

Whoever thought the guy's name would be Foster? Most people would think the Charles Foster Home would be run by people named Charles, not Foster. Jeez, you never know.

The thing is, everywhere I looked it seemed like there was a sort of circle bringing me back to the Charles Foster Home and Cara Watson. Not that I'd been looking too hard for Cara Watson. She was the key to it all, though. The missing part to the puzzle.

I dreamed about her one night, the eyes floating in the air above me, silent and grave. I wanted to talk to her about the Bobby Suggs thing and the Charles Foster Home, but I hadn't actually tried to find her yet. I interviewed some of the local bondage talent, only no one had heard of Bobby Suggs and no one had ever heard of anyone wanting little x's carved into them until they bled to death. I could tell it was an intriguing idea, though. Guess there's gonna be a run on Exacto knives.

I didn't get a break until Coop called me to come have a look at another of the70th's little treats. "Coop, give me a break. I'm gonna retire here pretty soon–what makes you think I want to look at yet another disgusting corpse?"

"Hey, you know you want to, Captain. C'mon, meet me on Third down by the power station. You'll see the cars.”

I signed out and drove over to Third. The power station was really just a city substation, a couple of fenced-in towers and a little building with WPA written allover it. Coop met me outside and we walked in through the gate in the chain link.

"So what's the deal?" I asked him.

He pointed up and I saw it. It was just a face looking out of the tiny paned WPA building, staring down at us intently. Only there was something wrong with the eyes. They looked––blank. I thought about Cara Watson's eyes.

We walked around to the door of the building and went in. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, and the light coming through the little windows seemed filtered. There was something obstructing one of them. I went in a little closer, carefully as I didn't see the tech guys yet and I didn't want to mess up a crime scene.

The thing obstructing the window was an old office chair with something on it. The something was a wooden crate. The thing on the crate was a head.

I went in for a closer look––it was facing out the window, of course. I looked at it from the side and saw why the eyes had looked strange. It was because they had been gouged out.

"So where's the rest?" I asked Coop. "You know, the body and the eyeballs?"

Coop grinned. "Thought you'd never ask, Captain! Right this way." He led me back outside and around to the other side of the towers. Atop a heap of gardening mulch––the city is meticulous about its landscaping––was a slightly built man's body, minus the head. The mulch had absorbed a lot of the blood. The tech guys were swarming, photographing and measuring and scraping up samples of this and that. I didn't see the eyes, but they could have been anywhere in the pile of debris.

"My guess is he was killed here and the head severed and drained on the spot, maybe the eyes gouged, too. I'd guess a hacksaw." Coop's assessment matched mine. "Anyway, just thought you'd like to see it, that's all."

"Thanks, Coop––you know how I love this stuff." If Coop caught the sarcasm in my voice he didn't show it. "So who is he?" I didn't expect Coop to know, but I was wrong.

"Don'tcha recognize him, Captain? It's Red Tony."

Red Tony alias Anthony Redding ran a prostitution ring in my jurisdiction. He'd been in and out of jail a dozen times, mostly for assaulting his girls so badly the hospital called to complain.

"Why's he all done up like this?" I asked. It wasn't so bad to know Red Tony was out of business, but anyone would have expected he'd be shivved by one of his girls.

"I dunno," Coop said. "Just glad he's out for the big one."

Later, back at my desk, I wondered if Cara Watson had been one of Red Tony's girls. I put on my coat and went out for a walk.

I didn't have to walk too far to see one of Red Tony's girls, a large woman named Loretta. It must have been a chilly forty degrees out, but Loretta was in black velvet shorts and a leopard print tube top. Her bare legs were covered with large band-aids disguising the bruises and needle marks. As I got closer to her, I could see where her platinum wig stopped just a little short of her dark roots and smell the sour beer on her breath. "Hey, baby," she said without looking directly at me, "wanna party? Little bitty party only a coupla bucks. We can do it right here, honey." It was a hissing, automatic litany.

"Loretta!" I spoke her name loudly to get her attention. She looked up with blank eyes. "Loretta!" I practically shouted.

She snapped her head around toward me. "What? Hey, you gonna hassle me?"

Her bland features sharpened into fear and disgust. I could see she was on the tail end of a high.

"C'mon, Loretta, let's talk over there. I won't keep you long." I steered her by her elbow to a bench next to an overflowing wastebasket. A couple of elderly women in cashmere coats eyed us with prim expressions and walked on.

"Tell me about Red Tony," I said.

"Red Tony's dead," she mouthed. "Poor Tony. He was good to us.…"

I could see tears welling up in her bloodshot eyes, spilling a rivulet of cheap mascara down her rouged cheek.

"No, he wasn't, Loretta. He made your miserable life even worse and you know it. Now who did it to him?"

Loretta shook her head. "I––I don't know. No one knows." She gurgled a little and I was afraid she might start to sob.

"What about Cara Watson?" I asked. I pulled out a ten-dollar bill.

"She's a pretty little thing," Loretta said dreamily, grabbing at the money. "She's a pretty one. So pretty. So bad."

"Bad? What do you mean, Loretta? What do you mean by bad?" I could see Cara's eyes, silent, serious.

"Bad, bad, bad! She's bad!" Loretta was swaying and singing the words in a high little voice.

I changed tactics slightly. "Where is she, Loretta? Where can I find Cara?"

Loretta focused on me for a second. "This isn't her street, honey. This street's mine. She's on Del Mar." For that second the person inside Loretta's deteriorating exterior looked out, then she vanished again.

Del Mar was on the other side of town, a classier neighborhood. Girls working the streets there were younger and better looking, and their customers bathed regularly and had gold cufflinks, SUV's and wives. I cruised slowly, not wanting to attract attention.

I had to drive around quite a bit before I found the corner strip mall I was looking for. It had a nail salon, a dry cleaner and an auto parts shop. The girls stood on the corner checking their watches, their stockings, their hair. Customers parked on the side street in a sort of taxi line, pulling forward each time the front car scooped up a girl and drove off. Nifty setup, I thought. Efficient. No one loitered long enough for trouble, and as long as the businesses didn't complain, it was a sweet deal.

If I hadn't been looking for Cara, I might have missed her. She sat across the street in a parked Toyota Camry, just watching with those big, grave eyes. As the girls came back from their rides, they checked in with Cara. They got into the back seat of the Toyota for a few minutes, then went back out to the street to wait for the next ride. They were young, and most of them were reasonably pretty. They looked like high school or college girls, still fresh and clean. It was Cara who was running the business, assigning the girls and taking the cash after their tricks. How very convenient that Red Tony was lying sightless in the morgue in at least two pieces.

I watched Cara watching the girls. It would have been easy to approach her, to go over and put the cuffs on her, pull her in for questioning. I could have held her on almost anything. But I didn't. I just watched.

Finally, I drove back to my office and opened the bottom drawer of my desk. I looked at my office bottle for a while, then shut the drawer. I hadn't touched that bottle in over a decade.

The following week I put in my retirement papers and the department threw me a nice party. Andy's widow showed up, and I know everyone was hoping we'd hit it off or something. Even Coop was there, making stupid jokes and remembering the old days.

"So, Captain, what about your unsolveds? You gonna work 'em in your spare time?"

I laughed. "I don't think so, Coop. When I'm outta here, they go in the cold file. It's not like there are any I care about."

"Me, too," Coop agreed. "I can't wait to get out of this and go fishing off the Georgia coast." Coop could have retired anytime, but I knew he was racking up a few more months to help pay the insurance for his wife's illness.

"Call me when it's over, Coop," I said. "We'll both go fishing."

I knew he didn't give a flying rat's ass about his unsolveds, either. I was glad about that, since I could have solved them for him right then and there. But it would have meant explaining everything, and I knew I couldn't really do that.

I couldn't explain how those eyes had affected me, how heartsick the system that could produce them had made me.

When I cornered Morty Claypool in that alley, I let him know, before I cut his belly in two, how badly torn up Cara was inside because of what he did to her in that Foster Home. Then I planted the grenade in him, pulled the pin and ran around the corner before he blew to hell, which was where he belonged. The grenade had been a present from one of the homeless vets I'd taken off the street years ago. I had kept it in a trunk in the garage and I wasn't sure it would work anymore. Scared the hell out of me when it went off, but I was halfway down the block by then.

When I met Billy Suggs in the hotel room, he thought I was going to have some kind of perverted sex with him. He let me tie him up and put in the gag, for Chrissakes! I told him, through the hours it took for him to die, what it must have been like to be a scared little girl whose foster brothers raped and tortured her. I think he got the picture there towards the end.

Charles Foster was easy––hell, he was drunk and passed out already, and all I had to do was call up and tell his old lady the inspectors were coming. She took the kids to the mall and didn't come back until the place was smoking. By then, Old Man Foster was dead. I was sorry about the dog; I just couldn't think of a way to get him out of there. That damned fuse box really was a hazard, so it wasn't too difficult to start the fire. The hard part was waiting while everything ignited and making sure the old man didn't wake up and come out. Oh, and keeping out of the way of that sullen kid. I'm glad he didn't recognize me when I went back––I didn't really want to have to take care of any loose ends.

Red Tony was a good one. A little work on Coop's part would have turned up the fact that Red Tony was at the Charles Foster Home around that same time, too. Red Tony, who kicked Cara senseless and passed her around at the home, who liked to watch. Red Tony isn't going to watch much anymore, that's for sure. I don't know why I had to get so fancy with him––it was harder work than you'd expect. I had a dream once about his eyes sprouting from the mulch where I'd planted them, growing up on pale stalks.

I don't go back to Del Mar anymore. The last time I was out there, someone else was in the Toyota and I figured Cara was strictly on the business end of things. I've never spoken to her, but I believe she knows who helped her––I'm sure she does. And since then, I haven't seen those eyes at all.

THE END