by J L Aarne
They ate and Rainer stood by and watched the water run while Thomas washed their dishes. Then they went to bed, though they didn’t sleep. They had sex again, slower than before, what felt like an eternity for Rainer. It was so intense and strange that, in the end, climax for Rainer was oddly anticlimactic when compared to all that came before it. He still set his teeth against the curve of Thomas’s neck and bit down against a scream when he came.
“I swear I felt our souls merge, Thomas,” Rainer whispered to him.
Thomas lay over him, exhausted and breathing heavily. He coughed a soft laugh and moved off of him to lie on his side. “You are going to be so embarrassed about all this later if you remember it,” he said.
“Why wouldn’t I remember it?” Rainer asked. He turned his head to look at Thomas and his eyes filled with tears. “I don’t want to forget it.”
“Whoa,” Thomas said. He brushed damp hair back from Rainer’s face and tucked it behind his ear. “Are you crying?”
“I don’t know,” Rainer said. He lifted a hand to touch his wet face with alarm. “Oh, no. Thomas, why is this happening? Thomas? Make it stop!”
Alarmed himself and a little bewildered, Thomas pulled Rainer into his arms and shushed him. “It’s okay, pumpkin. It’s completely normal,” he said. “People cry all the time. It’s not a big deal.”
“I don’t cry though. Oh God, I don’t think I like it,” Rainer said. He sniffed and wiped at his face. “Thomas, sing me something else.”
“Ah. Okay…” Thomas hummed a few bars experimentally. Then he started to sing “People Are Strange” in his low voice. It made Rainer smile.
When Thomas finished the song, Rainer was still holding onto him, his head on Thomas’s shoulder, and he had stopped weeping. He took a deep breath and it shook on the way out.
“You used to cry, you know,” Thomas said. “I was only two, but I remember when Mom and Dad brought you home. You screamed all the time. It was the first time I ever thought about killing anyone.”
“Aww, that’s sweet, Thomas,” Rainer said.
“No, Rainer, it isn’t.”
“How would you have done it?”
“Smothered you, probably.”
“You were two.”
“Smothered you with my teddy bear then.”
Rainer laughed, picturing it. “You would have been sorry.”
“I doubt it,” Thomas said. “I didn’t know you yet and you wouldn’t stop fucking screaming. You did that for a couple of weeks after you were born. Mom was probably thinking about murdering you herself by the time you finally shut up.”
They lay there for a minute not saying anything else. Rainer was dozing when Thomas remembered that he had bit him and cursed. He got out of bed, muttering about infection and bacteria.
“You better not have broken the skin this time, Rainer,” he said. He went out the door and across the hall to the bathroom, raising his voice to still be heard as he went. “It’s by my neck. That’s right next to my jugular, which goes up to my brain. You’re going to give me a brain infection. I swear to God, I’m never having sex with you again when you’re on drugs.”
“Wow, you’re a liar, Thomas,” Rainer scoffed.
“Fuck,” Thomas said.
Rainer looked up at the ceiling above the bed and laughed. “Is it bleeding?” he called.
“No, but Jesus. I could take a cast of your teeth off my shoulder probably,” Thomas said.
He returned to the bedroom rubbing over the bruised spot with an alcohol swab. There was a scar near the bruise where Rainer had broken the skin the first time. Thomas had scars on his hands where he’d cut himself countless times trying to learn how to chop and dice like Jacques Pépin, but the web of skin between the forefinger and thumb of his right hand was also marked forever by Rainer’s teeth. Rainer wasn’t usually a screamer in bed, but he wasn’t a quiet lover and they’d had to worry about their parents overhearing them all through high school.
Rainer liked the scars on Thomas. He always had. He was still laughing softly when Thomas returned to the bed and he grabbed him and pulled him down with him. “I love you, Thomas. Don’t be mad.”
Thomas lowered his head and kissed him, whispering, “Say it again.”
Chapter 21
Ezekiel returned to Rainer’s place the next day before the sun came up to find Thomas’s car still parked outside. He had gone by Sol’s to get the coke he’d asked him about, picked up Jacob from the airport and spent the rest of the evening with him, but Jacob had been tired and turned in early.
Ezekiel did a few lines of coke and sat up all night working at the table in the kitchen, thinking about Henry Lee Cairn, about the poor girls whose lives he had destroyed, about going to court, about keeping his cool. He did not think about Rainer Bryssengur or about Rainer Bryssengur fucking his brother or about the unexpected parallel between himself and the psychopathic killer. He didn’t think about the moaning way Rainer’s voice saying “I love you” had sounded coming to him through that closed door. He thought about work.
Mostly.
Ezekiel snorted a bump of coke off his car key, wiped under his nose and licked the white residue off the side of his hand. It was still dark out, so he didn’t worry about being seen. He was in a neighborhood where he had no reason to be and no one would come looking for him either. He’d been watching Rainer’s apartment building for an hour and not much had moved since he’d parked.
He pressed the light button on the side of his watch and checked the time. He wouldn’t be expected in to work for three more hours and it was turning out to be a pretty boring stakeout. At this rate, if they were keeping score, Rainer was definitely winning whatever head-game they were playing simply by filling Ezekiel’s days with obsession broken by prolonged periods of tedium.
The door to Rainer’s apartment opened and Thomas stepped out wearing different clothes from those he’d been wearing the evening before when Ezekiel watched him arrive. He went to his car, started it and pulled out of the parking lot. Ezekiel looked after him for a moment before he decided to follow him. Whatever Thomas was doing, it promised to be more interesting than what Rainer was doing—probably sleeping.
The sleep cycle of the average free-range psychopath is—
“Shut up,” Ezekiel muttered.
He kept at least two cars between himself and Thomas as he followed him, though he doubted Thomas was expecting to be tailed or that he was adept at surveillance aversion tactics. Thomas drove to Centzon Totochtin, parked in the front and walked around to the back where a supply truck was parked and waiting. Ezekiel pulled into the parking lot of the hotel around the corner and walked over to the restaurant.
Thomas was signing paperwork on a clipboard when Ezekiel slipped around two of the men unloading produce and approached him. He smelled like wolf and that answered one question for Ezekiel. Rainer always carried a faint scent of wolf on him and Ezekiel had been watching him long enough to know that he didn’t come by it through Cosra Melmoth.
“I only ordered four crates of—” Thomas broke off, noticing the shoes of the person standing beside him. They were nice, expensive even; not the shoes of a produce deliveryman. He looked up at Ezekiel, did not recognize him, but noted his nice suit and the air of authority and faint menace about him and scowled. “Who the fuck are you?” he demanded. Then immediately added, “I don’t care. You’re trespassing. Get the hell out.”
Ezekiel smiled and took his ID from his inside jacket pocket. He showed it to Thomas. “FBI. Mr. Bryssengur, I’d like to ask you a few questions if you don’t mind.”
“And if I do mind?” Thomas asked. He reached around Ezekiel to hand one of the deliverymen his clipboard. “Look, Agent, I’m busy and you’re in the way. Unless you’ve got a court order, I don’t have to answer your questions and I don’t have to let you in here. We’re closed, so you’re trespassing.”
Ezekiel took a few steps back until he was standing outside of the delivery door. H
e leaned in the doorway and spread his hands palm up. “There,” he said. “Happy?”
“Not remotely,” Thomas said. “I don’t have anything to say to you.”
“Don’t you even want to know what my questions are about?” Ezekiel asked.
Thomas crossed his arms. “No. I don’t.”
They regarded each other across the short distance for a full minute without either of them giving an inch. Finally, Ezekiel broke eye contact and let his gaze take Thomas in from head to toe. His eyes rested briefly on the curve of his shoulder by his neck before moving back to his face. He smiled.
“I’m curious about your brother, Rainer,” he said.
Thomas glared.
“From what I’ve gathered, the two of you are very… close,” Ezekiel said.
“What’s your point?” Thomas asked.
“I do admire how really ballsy it was to attend prom together,” Ezekiel continued like Thomas had said nothing.
Thomas’s eyes widened in surprise. “You motherfuck—”
“And then have pictures taken of it. That takes real guts. It’s amazing what you can find with some real dedication and a good Internet connection.”
Thomas picked up a tomato out of a case near him and gestured with it at Ezekiel. “You get the fuck out of my place right now,” he snarled. “I’ve got nothing to say to you and I will not listen to your bullshit. I’ve got work to do.”
Ezekiel smirked and casually folded his arms, eyeing Thomas with amusement. He was poking at him intentionally to get a rise out of him and it hadn’t been hard. If Thomas Bryssengur had a button to push guaranteed to make him go from zero to critical it was his little brother Rainer. Ezekiel looked at him and wondered if it went the other way, too. Would Rainer lose his cool under the same circumstances?
Somehow, he didn’t think so. Not outwardly, anyway. But Thomas was important to him.
“You do have a hell of a temper,” Ezekiel remarked.
Thomas raised an eyebrow at him. “You’re not here to ask me questions,” he said. “I don’t know what you want, special agent man, but I’m done talking to you. Leave.”
“Or what? You’ll call the police?” Ezekiel asked.
“Yeah, maybe I will,” Thomas said. “It’s still illegal to trespass and harass people if you’re a cop.”
Ezekiel moved a hand from his elbow to point at the livid mark on Thomas’s neck. “Out of curiosity, how long have you been fucking him?”
Thomas’s bark of laughter was more angry than amused. “None of your goddamn business,” he snapped.
Ezekiel grinned. Thomas snarled at him, the sound all wolf in his anger, and stalked over to yank the large rolling door closed on him. Ezekiel caught it one-handed and stopped it from closing on him.
“Give Rainer a kiss for me when you see him again, Thomas,” he said. Then he let the door go and hopped off the side of the truck’s unloading ramp to the ground.
The door rattled open as Thomas threw it up. A large tomato sailed after Ezekiel, missed his shoulder my a few inches and splattered on the pavement in front of him. Ezekiel laughed and walked on.
Chapter 22
Henry Lee Cairn was a sick son of a bitch. He had raped nine women between August and December in 2014 and left them for dead. Three of them were horribly mutilated. Four of them had broke down in hysterics at the police station when they’d been unable to identify him. One of them had gotten pregnant from her encounter and one, Molly Morgan, Cairn’s final victim, had committed suicide.
Of the eight women still alive, most of them would never be able to have children, assuming they ever wanted to. Of them all, only two of the women were going to be able to testify. Crewes had been charged with evaluating the five who wanted to testify and deemed the other three either too emotionally unstable to handle it or their memories of the events too unreliable.
That was all she was allowed to tell Ezekiel about it because he was testifying in the case. He arrived at his office in a pretty good mood after his little visit with Thomas, but that didn’t last. He did some paper work, approved the end of Al Brockden’s suspension, talked to a detective in Olympia, Washington about a case the detective had been trying to get the FBI’s help on and agreed to send someone.
He called Schechter and Kenner to his office, gave them the assignment and they were off to Olympia.
It was work like he did every day, but in the back of his mind, he had Henry Lee Cairn lurking. He checked the time constantly, waiting. At noon, he ate lunch at his desk—some kind of stew Jacob had packed for him that he reheated—and read over his notes on the rapist for the umpteenth time. He could have recited all of it verbatim by memory, but this case had bothered him and he had this feeling it just wasn’t going to go the way he wanted it to.
Cairn had a good lawyer—a great lawyer. Anthony Pruitt was who you called if you could afford him and you had raped somebody. He defended a lot of rape cases and he won a good number of them because rape was one of the hardest things there was to prosecute and he was smart. Smart and sleazy, but he was charming, too, and jurors liked him. Ezekiel had seen him make jurors like his raping clients. A jury that liked a guy was likely to acquit him.
Ezekiel ate his stew, checked the clock on the wall again and decided it was time to go over to the courthouse. He might have to sit outside and wait awhile, but more likely he’d be caught in traffic on the way over anyway.
There was a lot of traffic during the lunch hour and he did get caught in it for some time, but he made it to the court with some time to spare and still had to wait about an hour to be called.
Ezekiel testified for the prosecution about the profile he’d given the police, which had been significant in the apprehension of Henry Lee Cairn. He told the court what kind of man the rapist was, how along with the evidence, knowing that information had lead detectives to the defendant. Ezekiel hadn’t been there when he was arrested, but he’d heard about it over beers later from the detective who’d had the honor of slapping the cuffs on him. Cairn hadn’t been surprised by it and he’d mocked them for not catching him sooner.
The prosecutor, Charles DeWitt, was a friend of Ezekiel’s and a good man. He was also a good lawyer, but being a good man sometimes interfered with that. “Many of the victims in this case spent time in the hospital and had surgery as a result of injuries they suffered during their assault,” he said. “Can you describe for the court some of these injuries and what kind of man would—”
“Objection. The witness is not a doctor,” Pruitt said.
“Actually, I am,” Ezekiel said. “Of psychology.”
Pruitt glared at him. “The witness is not a medical doctor,” he said.
“Your Honor, the question is not of a surgical nature,” DeWitt said.
“Agent Herod may answer the question, but be careful, Mr. DeWitt,” the judge said.
“In your professional opinion, Agent Herod, what kind of man does the things that were done to these women?” DeWitt asked.
He had already entered photographs of the victims into evidence and the court had seen the women’s beaten, mutilated bodies. Ezekiel was sure Pruitt had objected to that as well.
He looked over at the defense’s table, at Henry Lee Cairn in his cheap suit, slumped in his chair with his devil-may-care attitude, his boyish good looks, oozing good humor and charm. Ezekiel didn’t know what had been happening in court before he arrived to testify, but that feeling he’d been having that it wasn’t going his way jumped up several notches as he looked at Cairn and Cairn looked back and smiled.
“The rapist in this case is a coward who takes his victims with violent blitz attacks,” Ezekiel said. Cairn’s smile slipped. “Like most rapes, it’s not about sex. It’s about power, which he feels he doesn’t have in his daily life. Specifically, power to dominate women. He works a menial job, he is single and has had few very short-term relationships, if any, with the opposite sex. His behavior and manner would be initially charming but ultim
ately off-putting, which would lead to repeated rejection. The level of violence in these attacks is indicative of extreme rage. The women were severely beaten then when unconscious, their attacker mutilated them. In two cases, he attempted to perform a clitoridectomy on his victims subsequent to the rape while they were still unconscious. It was suggested by an agent on my team that this was not only about domination, but also about possession. Taking away his victims’ ability to enjoy sex after he was finished with them. He used a knife like the one found on Mr. Cairn’s person at the time of his arrest.”
“Objection,” Pruitt snapped, shoving to his feet. “Agent Herod was not present at the time of my client’s arrest. His knowledge of it is hearsay.”
“The knife has been entered into evidence, Your Honor,” DeWitt protested. “Agent Herod would know about it.”
“Overruled, Mr. Pruitt,” the judge said. “Continue, please, Agent.”
“The attacker also used foreign objects to sodomize his victims, resulting in necessary surgery. In the case of Molly Morgan, so severely that a foot of the young woman’s intestine had to be removed and—”
“Objection!” Pruitt shouted. “That evidence has been dismissed on the grounds that—”
“I am familiar with my own ruling on the matter, councilor,” the judge said sternly. “Sustained. Agent Herod, you will limit your statements to evidence relevant to this case.”
All evidence regarding Molly Morgan’s suicide had been disallowed early on. The judge had decided that it would unfairly sway the jury and was not relevant to the case. It seemed unfair to Ezekiel that the girl, who had taken her own life after being so horribly destroyed by what Cairn had done to her, was not only silenced in death, but those who would speak for her were to be silenced on the matter as well. But he tried to keep his temper and hold his tongue.