by John Philpin
Jaycie lamented what technology was doing to the business world. “All the old sci-fi is coming true,” she said. “Watch the drones file into the office building and march to their cubicles. I’d rather work on an assembly line. At least then I could shout to my neighbor.”
Amanda Squires, the group’s thinker, had little to say. She sipped ale, dipped chips, and observed.
“What about the serial killer in Washington State, Dr. Frank?” Kai Lin asked. “He’s killed mostly in Spokane, but also across the state in Tacoma.”
“I doubt that Dr. Frank wants to talk business,” Jaycie said.
“You get to ask him in class. I don’t.”
I shrugged. “I’m not familiar with the case.”
“His victims are women… drug addicts, prostitutes, street people. The police haven’t said much about what he does to them, except that he shoots them execution-style. That’s unusual for a serial killer, isn’t it?”
I hesitated, and carefully chose my words. “A gun is not a common choice of weapon for a serial murderer, but I think that how this killer’s choices are statistically different is less important than what the manner of killing means to him.”
“A gun is noisy,” Kai Lin said. “It can be traced.”
“Which suggests something about the killings,” I said, “and raises a question about the killer. The women were most likely killed in isolated areas, and the shooter isn’t concerned about the gun being traced.”
“What does it mean to him?” Sara asked.
“We could state generalizations about weapon choice, but without knowing much more, we can’t be at all specific.”
“Police experts say the killer has some legitimate reason to be traveling from one end of the state to another.”
“They know more than we do,” I said, “but killing might be reason enough.”
“The article I read also said that killers who target prostitutes are street people. They don’t look out of place. They fit in with the scene, so nobody suspects them.”
“That’s one possibility,” I agreed.
“What’s another one?” Kai Lin asked.
I thought of my experiences in Boston’s “Combat Zone.” “Cops, military personnel, college kids out for a night on the town.”
“They think he spends time with his victims before he kills them,” Sara said. “I know. They know more than we do. The same expert said that criminal profiling is a science that’s based on comparing the patterns of known serial killers with a particular case.”
“Which explains why no profile ever caught a killer,” I said.
“Do we have to talk about this now?” Jaycie asked.
“Just this one thing,” Amanda interjected. “You’ve caught killers. How do you do it?”
“Short answer,” I said. “I don’t want to spoil the party.”
Amanda agreed.
“Everything we do reveals something about us. Regardless of whether we want it to, our behavior always communicates. Archeologists learn the history of past cultures from their remnants. I examine behavioral traces at a crime scene and learn the history of a personality.”
“But that’s so insubstantial,” Sara protested. “How do you make the jump from personality to a person?”
“It has to do with the way Dr. Frank looks at things,” Jaycie told Sara, “and the questions he asks.”
Then she shifted her attention to me. “When our seminarians weren’t reading their Bibles, they bred and boarded horses to help pay for their education. I told you I’d find out. Now can we talk about something else?”
Jaycie Waylon was a bright, clever young woman whose sense of humor, and the accompanying sparkle in her eyes, delighted me. One of the reasons I had snapped up the offer of a temporary teaching position was to be among young, inquisitive minds. Jaycie epitomized the type of student I had imagined.
Our party wound down shortly after ten, and my guests departed, leaving me with a smile and a good feeling about abandoning my Michigan sanctuary.
I PULLED THE OLD VOLVO TO THE SIDE OF THE ROAD at the bottom of the hill.
So, he has time to play with the girls.
I climbed from the car into ankle-deep mud. Rain smacked into my face.
And the girls have time to play.
I stared at a chain-link fence across the road.
In the place where they forced me to live, the walls were brick and tall. Gargoyles crouched on cornices, their concrete shoulders hunched, teeth bared, fingers splayed, as if they were about to pounce. Steel screens covered the windows. Circles of razor wire topped the chain-link fences, row after row.
“There’s no way out,” the attendant had said when he found me with my face pressed to the screen.
I believed that if people could get in there, they could certainly get out.
No one sees the same world that anyone else sees. What is inside must sometimes be outside.
I made myself small, nearly invisible. No one noticed me. I vanished, sometimes even from myself.
Now, I checked the clip on my .22 semiautomatic and slapped it into place.
I left the car with the driver’s-side door ajar, engine running, interior light glowing, and hiked up the hill through the muck. As I approached the house, I left the road and moved among the trees.
Music and laughter drifted from the house.
Time, fucking time to play, all the time in the world.
Did you ever have dreams that sang to you? Mine are blue. Spilled blood surges through them like raging red cascades.
Death dreams.
Scenes from a slaughterhouse set on indigo.
These screaming mind-scrawlings and their flutish, stringy, percussive soundtrack are my concerto of reciprocation. If you wound me, you die.
He fucking wounded me. She pisses me off.
“The girl that keeps touching his arm dies,” I whispered, staring through the window and wondering if I could get off a decent shot.
“Off with their heads,” a voice crackled behind me.
I spun around and saw nothing but spruce and white pine and barren beech. The trees crowded me like ghostly guardians. The fall of rain hissed and snapped through the trees.
Then, as if an echo, or a distant voice in the forest, or a whisper, the voice came again.
“Off with their heads.”
I ran through the woods, sliding and falling into the mud. “I’ll kill all of you,” I screamed into the night.
I stayed down, feeling the mire soak through my clothes and soil me. Today, tonight, the blackness, the rain—I have waited all days for someday.
No one answered my scream. There was no echo.
I had learned to never expect an answer. Voices arrive only when they are unsolicited. They make me angry.
I see slash-and-burn images in colors that do not exist. I hear echoes of sounds that I never sent into the world.
Coming back to me.
I saw him. He’s so fucking old.
I wanted to live on Pleasant Street, but it’s much too late for that.
Instead, I spawned an appetite for murder. Then I nurtured it, like you nourish a complicated thought sequence as you struggle to bring it to fruition.
Closure.
Everyone dies sometime.
When you fail to touch me, and I want—need—to be touched you have given me the only license that I need.
When I was a child, my stepfather punched my mother so hard that she heard echoes inside her head. She felt nothing after the first blow, and if she saw the first one coming, she didn’t feel that, either. She never struggled. She knew there was nothing she could do.
He used his knife to let her know what would happen if she told anyone. He always drew blood—nicked her on the arm or the leg. She has scars all over her body.
So do I.
I pushed myself up from the muck, wiped the rain from my eyes, and struggled through the scrub growth. I found the road, and hiked the hundred yards downhill
to the car.
If you would like to draw a picture, I have finished with the blue.
I will be using the red now.
I SPENT SATURDAY MORNING ARRANGING MY TEMPORARY living quarters to my liking. A seascape that looked as if it had been sold out of the back of a van parked on the side of a highway, had to be closeted. I trashed the bathroom night-light, a hollow plastic rendition of a dashboard deity, then tossed the blossom-scented soap and placed a bar of Ivory in the soap tray.
The study also required attention. The last visiting professor to occupy the house must have been a writer, or at least a teacher of writing. At eye level beyond the desk was an entire shelf of how-to books—everything from character and plot to selling that first novel—volumes dedicated to homogenized expression.
“Wonder if Anne Sexton read this shit,” I muttered as I swept the paperbacks into a carton.
When I finished with the shelf, it held a small stone carving of an African lowlands gorilla that was a gift from my daughter, a photograph of Lane and her mother taken on Lane’s recent trip to Congo, a stack of CDs, and three books: Reid Meloy’s The Psychopathic Mind, volume four of The Collected Papers of Milton H. Erickson on Hypnosis, and Mary Beth Rogers’s Barbara Jordan: American Hero.
At noon, Jaycie Waylon stopped by and invited me to lunch. “There’s this great little Portuguese restaurant on the flats,” she said. “They make the most incredible fish sandwiches.”
“I’m sold,” I said, and grabbed a jacket.
“My motives are not entirely honorable,” Jaycie said as she drove north on the causeway. “I have some questions.”
“Quest away,” I said, enjoying the view. “I assumed you had an agenda.”
“Did you work on other kinds of cases besides murder?”
“A few. What do you have in mind?”
“White-collar crime.”
I glanced at her. “One case,” I said.
“You don’t sound like it was the high point of your career.”
“A bank retained me through an intermediary. My job was to examine several death threats sent through interoffice mail to a bank officer, to provide a personality assessment, probable motive, and assist them with focusing their investigation. When I realized that I hadn’t received all the information, I called my contact. Some of the threatening notes had been withheld because they alleged sexual involvements by the officer, dalliances which the bank deemed irrelevant to the case.”
“That should have been up to you to determine,” Jaycie said.
“I returned their materials and quit.”
“Do you think it was blackmail?”
I shrugged. “Never gave it another thought. I also never worked for a private corporation or a federal agency after that. It’s too much like trying to work a jigsaw puzzle that the cat’s been using for a sandbox.”
Jaycie laughed. “What an image.”
“Why do you ask about white-collar crime?”
“I’ll explain over lunch,” she said, pulling into a gravel parking lot in front of what appeared to be a shack on stilts leaning precariously over the mudflats.
A small, paint-flaked sign said only “Nuñez Fish.”
“What it may lack in aesthetics, it more than makes up for with its food.”
“I was thinking of architectural soundness. Let’s find a table on this side of the building. I don’t want to share my dessert with the clams.”
The ambience was fishnet and buoys—seafaring in cramped quarters. My haddock sandwich on a homemade roll was everything Jaycie had promised.
“Told you so,” she said.
“What’s the salad dressing?”
“Olive oil, tarragon. Oh, that’s right. You’re a food freak.”
I laughed. “I think I might phrase it differently. How do you know so much about me?”
“When I heard you were coming to Harbor, I did some research, mostly on the Internet.”
“You mean that my love of food is floating around in the electronic ether?”
“That and a lot more.”
“My life is an open byte,” I said. “You wanted to ask me about corporate crime.”
She wiped her mouth with her napkin and shot glances around the crowded restaurant. “When I was a sophomore, before I got my internship with Martin International…”
At that moment, Stu Gilman walked into the restaurant. He spotted us immediately and made his jerky way to our table.
“God, I don’t believe his timing,” Jaycie said.
“Lucas, Jaycie,” Gilman said, with head bobs that might have been greetings or minor seizures. “Beautiful day. Enjoying lunch?”
“Excellent food,” I said.
Jaycie said nothing.
“Showing Dr. Frank our eateries?” he asked.
Her face reddened. She smiled, nodded, and rearranged the few remaining home fries on her plate.
“Well,” Gilman rumbled in a lower register, “gotta get my lobster roll. Enjoy the day.”
Jaycie watched Gilman waddle to the counter. “Let’s go,” she said.
She was silent as we drove to the village.
“Gilman rubs you the wrong way,” I said.
She hesitated. “Yeah.”
“Anything you want to talk about?” I asked, leaving the option entirely to Jaycie.
After a moment she said, “I guess not.”
“What about sophomore year?”
“Not that either, I guess.”
I nodded. I liked Jaycie Waylon. That may sound like an odd statement, but I don’t like many people.
Gilman’s arrival at the restaurant had startled and silenced Jaycie. Whatever distressed her would eventually surface, I thought. She had assumed the role of my personal guide to the school and the village. We would have other opportunities to discuss white-collar crime.
Jaycie dropped me at the house, then headed to her Saturday class.
I completed my reclamation project on the house, and curled onto the sofa with pen and pad. The class had already suggested directions for itself: aggression, the male propensity for aggression, male sexual pathology, the politics of gender, theories of serial violence, and exceptions to the theories.
All I had to do, I thought, was put a little meat on the bare bones, and I had the next five months knocked.
I HATE SUNDAYS.
When I was young, church was mandatory. The minister was a gentle, wise Frenchman who seemed to know something about everything. The building was an architectural dream, a stone mini-cathedral perched on the bank of a river. That my attendance there on Sundays was required was an abomination.
My mother issued the order; my sister enforced it.
“Why do I have to?” I whined.
“Ma says,” my sister said.
“That’s not a reason.”
“Change your pants.”
“If Ma said, ‘Chop off your brother’s head,’ would you do it?”
“Where’s that blue sweater I like?”
Even the light was different on Sunday. It flooded the living room—yellow, dull, dusty.
“It’s holy light,” my sister said.
“The air is putrid,” I muttered.
My sister took my hand. “We’ll be late for the bus.”
Now, years later but with the same Sunday angst, I yanked on my jeans, grabbed a flannel shirt, and shuffled in my moccasins to the kitchen to make coffee. I gazed through the window at the overcast day and watched as an unmarked police cruiser pulled into the driveway.
Herb Jaworski was a short, two-hundred-pound man whose curly hair remained black, despite his sixty-five years. He arrived at my door attired in coveralls and a red wool jacket. During my few days in Maine, it had become clear to me that this was “the Maine uniform.” It was also the uniform of the Ragged Harbor Police Department. Jaworski had been chief of the small-town police force for thirty-two years.
That morning, he stood on my porch, hat in hand, and said, “I’ve heard of
you, Dr. Frank. In fact, I read one of your books, Crime Reconstruction and Personality Profiling.”
I assumed it was a social call. “Come in. We can talk over coffee.”
The chief shook his head. “We don’t get too many murders here,” he said as he stood on my porch, fidgeted with his navy watch cap, and shifted his ample weight from one lug-soled boot to another. “When we do, we get good support from our state people. This situation has stretched all of us pretty much to the max. We don’t know what the hell we’re dealing with.”
I raised an eyebrow and waited for him to latch on to a coherent thought. He didn’t.
“Chief, I’m afraid I’m not following you,” I told him.
“It’s been all over the TV.”
Jaworski’s tone and facial expression communicated pure astonishment. How could I not know something that had been defined as reality by the tube? If Tom Brokaw says it is, it is.
“I don’t watch much TV,” I told him. “There isn’t one here.”
“Well, I talked it over with some folks in Augusta. They checked you out, said there wouldn’t be any harm done if I could get you to take a look at this.”
The chief’s circumlocution amused me, but I figured it was time to put him out of his misery and get to the point.
“Just what have you got?”
I never should have asked.
I DRAGGED OVER A CHAIR, SAT, AND STARED IN HORROR at two bloodstained beds.
In every other way, the room resembled any room occupied by college students. The twin beds were separated by a scarred oak desk. A second desk, with bureaus on both sides of it, squatted against the opposite wall. Both desks held computers, stacks of books, papers, and spiral-bound notebooks.
But this room wore rust-colored smears on its walls, and there were coagulated pools of black blood in the bedding. The students, now and forever to be known as victims, had departed in zippered bags.
They left as packaged people, I thought.
Technicians carried vials and plastic Baggies in and out of the apartment. Uniformed cops measured and sketched.
“Give me the photographs,” I said, reaching behind me, never allowing my eyes to move from the evidence of the carnage that someone committed there.