The Immortal Gene

by Jonas Saul

  What he had no time for were unknown enemies. And when they came for him, he would be waiting. He would be ready.

  There wouldn’t just be broken bones and people getting neurotoxic saliva. Break into his home again and he would dole out severe punishments. Under threat of extreme pain, whoever came for him next would explain everything Jake wanted to know. Jake had just tested his strength and understood just how powerful he was. If he could snap a large man’s forearm with the grip of one hand, who knew what he could do in anger to a man’s whole body?

  There was a side of Jake that wanted to find out.

  As soon as they came for him.

  The scent on the breeze told him it would be very soon.

  He smiled to himself as he walked back to his house remembering how he had left the grocery bags sitting in his driveway.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The house was ready. Most importantly, Jeffrey was ready. The party was days away. He planned on being in Huntsville the day before. Stay in a hotel for the last day as a single man. He was simply too antsy to remain in his quiet house, alone, staring into the yawning opening of the safe room’s maw.

  The old clock upstairs in the living room made the familiar dings to signify midnight. After a long day at work, he’d poured himself a Scotch and sat, staring into the void of the safe room. The fun he would soon have. The wife, in the soundproof room, would be his to offer comfort and joy at will. And for her to offer duties as a wife to a husband. Oh, the fun they would soon have was unbearable to think about.

  He loved the name Jeffrey. The name his stepfather had given him. His real name, his legal name was Edwin Gavin. Detective Joslin always called him Dr. Gavin. He had grown to like that.

  Edwin.

  Gavin.

  He thought of Wally. Wally’s women. No wonder his stepfather had done it this way. How come Jeffrey/Edwin hadn’t thought of it before? Probably because of the mistakes his father had made. Stupid old man. You can’t take a woman and possess her without precautions in place. His father had been sloppy. Wally the sloppy.

  Edwin grinned. He sipped from his Scotch, felt it calm his insides.

  Wally had been reckless. The only real woman he’d tamed was Edwin’s mother, Cynthia. He had tamed her so well, she’d even gotten to the point where she helped him with Wally’s Gatherings. Complacent, understanding of her husband’s needs, Cynthia had often led the random women into Wally’s trap.

  Karla Homolka and that fiend Paul Bernardo came to mind when Edwin thought of his parents. Just like Karla leading her own sister to slaughter, Cynthia had led countless women to Wally. And just like Bernardo, Wally had kept the women for days, sometimes weeks, sexually torturing them until there was nothing left of their sex organs. Wally didn’t film any of it like Bernardo, though. Wally was smarter. He’d tortured and murdered at least a dozen women before the police had come looking for Wally when Edwin was only twelve.

  He remembered that night like it was yesterday. His dad had kept calling him Jeffrey, the son his father had lost too early.

  Edwin still used the name Jeffrey in honor of his father’s memory. He still wore the glasses and grew the beard, just as Jeffrey would. To be Wally’s son was to be a part of Wally. And to be like him was to take on his mannerisms, his understanding of women and their place as a separate species among men. The feminized world didn’t understand it, so laws were enacted to reduce the amount of sexual violation. Laws were passed to make people accountable and humiliate them in public when they were simply doing what testosterone-filled DNA called for. Wally had natural impulses. They weren’t alien. They were human.

  And Edwin had impulses. Real men had these notions, these ideas of how to deal with the opposite sex. It had been society that had forced men to be more afraid of the consequences of acting out, so they didn’t.

  Although, once they secured themselves a girlfriend or a wife, those same men role played and acted out their desires where the law didn’t intrude in their private lives.

  Look at how popular Fifty Shades of Grey was. There’s the answer right there.

  Edwin was smart. He’d studied medicine. He’d studied law. He’d devoted his time to learning what CSI crews found and what evidence they convicted criminals on. The Bernardo case had fascinated him when he was in his early twenties, watching it unfold before his eyes.

  Once he’d gotten his degree, he became a mortician to start. Then a medical examiner and coroner. As luck would have it, he’d gotten so good at his chosen field—passionately good—he had been pegged to head up the investigation into the Blood Eagle Killer—dubbed BEK—after his second gathering.

  Basically, he was supposed to find himself.

  A laughable matter.

  And after a series of mistakes, he’d even got Detective Joslin released from the case.

  The last family, the Marcellos, came as close as he had ever come to being caught. One of the crime scene individuals had found his fingerprint on the bottle of red wine he’d brought as a present. Usually something like that would be retrieved before he left the house, but he’d stupidly forgotten it. He wouldn’t make a mistake like that again.

  Detective Joslin had been delighted that they were finally making headway. Then Edwin had destroyed the evidence against him and set the case back to square one. The accident had taken place in the lab, after hours. Edwin explained his whereabouts and was never even criticized for his work. It was Detective Joslin who had lost her position as lead in the case. She was the fall guy when everyone from local mayors all the way up to the premier of the Province of Ontario wanted the BEK unsub found and incarcerated so families across the province could rest easy.

  Detective Kirk Aiken took over the case after a transfer to Toronto and began working with Edwin. It kept him close to what evidence came out of the Marcello farmhouse.

  What a sad thing that happened to Kirk’s partner. Horse allergy. Jake disappeared. Got attacked by a snake, then in a coma for almost two years.

  Edwin shook his head at the unfairness of life. He sipped the rest of his Scotch, then got up to pour more. Once he was back in his chair, he thought of his first kill and remembered how honored he’d felt about it.

  The night the police linked his father to the murder of some seventeen-year-old girl they’d found by the Don River, Wally had come home in a frantic state. He’d pulled Edwin aside and told him to put on his thinking cap. He needed an escape plan. A foolproof idea that enabled him to leave the house and go somewhere, anywhere, to avoid being taken to jail. The court system would take years and it would be a constant humiliation and reminder of what he had done. There was no way Wally was going to spend a single day being judged for what was a righteous action. If God didn’t want men to take a woman, to take a family, then why engineer men with those impulses, those urges? Not that it was God’s fault, Wally had said that night. He thanked God every day for the delight women offered him. Just that there might have been some foresight needed if he wasn’t supposed to do it.

  “There’s not much I can say,” Edwin had mumbled, afraid of the knock on the door coming at any second.

  “I can’t make it to the States in time. That’s almost a two-hour drive. They’ll watch for me at the border and you’re still too young to drive.” Wally paced the floor, walking back and forth rapidly. He slapped his forehead. “Think, dammit.”

  “Hide ’n’ Seek, Dad.”

  He snapped his head to the left briefly, glared at him, then resumed watching the carpet as he paced.

  “That might work, Jeffrey. That might work.”

  “Go hide in someone’s basement. I’ll bring food. Mom can help. In a while, go somewhere else.”

  “You’re smart, little Jeffrey. But where? Whose basement? My list of friends is somewhat limited at the moment.”

  Wally snatched a pack of cigarettes off a side table, lit one and puffed twice, then resumed pacing, drawing on the cigarette every third step. It was interesting how Wally wasn
’t a smoker, but when he was nervous, he smoked two or three.

  “I’m out of options,” Wally seethed. “They’ll be here any moment.”

  Edwin’s mother came bounding down the stairs. “Wally, I’m not leaving my home in police custody,” she screamed. “Come upstairs. We’ll leave together. Leave this place forever.”

  Wally stopped pacing so suddenly, Edwin thought he’d fall over. He cast a quick glance at Edwin, drew on the cigarette, then looked at his wife on the stairs.

  “Come here a moment, darling,” Wally said in the soft, alluring voice he used on his subjects.

  “We haven’t got time, Wally,” Cynthia said as she started toward him anyway. Edwin’s mother knew better than to defy him.

  Wally braced himself. Edwin had seen the pose before, heard that voice before. When he’d picked up the hooker and left her on the beach, the same look had come over Wally’s face. He puffed on the cigarette, letting the smoke encircle his face, most likely in an effort to hide his thoughts as his wife might be able to read him, too.

  Cynthia stopped a few feet away. Edwin moved backward until he bumped into the wood-paneled wall of the basement.

  “Cynthia, I’ve come up with a plan and I think you’re going to love it.”

  “Okay, Wally, but we have to leave right away—”

  He raised an index finger. Cynthia quieted. He drew on the smoke once more, then placed it in an ashtray to his right.

  “We are going to leave. Together,” he said. “No one will ever take us. I promise you dear, you will never see the inside of a courtroom.”

  “Okay,” Cynthia muttered, then looked sideways at Edwin. “What about him? Do we leave him or take him?”

  “He stays,” Wally said, his tone as dry as stale bread.

  Cynthia didn’t react to the knowledge that her son was not going with her. That was either a mark against her and her maternal instinct, or it was a sad mark of how much abuse she had endured over the years of living with Wally. Who was she now? Who had she become?

  At the age of twelve, Edwin had been fascinated with his father and the stories of his adventures. Hearing his mother didn’t care one way or the other whether she left him or not hit him in the solar plexus. It was probably more out of shock that his mother would be like that than from a place of actual pain.

  So, when Wally had punched her in the face and blood shot from her nose upon the first impact, Edwin had actually cheered him on. What a show that was. Wally punched and punched and punched until Cynthia’s lifeless body only moved because it was being pummeled.

  When Wally rolled off his bloodied wife’s body, Edwin pushed off the wall and came to stand above her. Cynthia’s face had caved in, a brown jelly-like liquid oozed upward and out of her eye sockets. Edwin concluded that it had to be her brains. He almost smiled as the saying beat her brains in echoed through his head. Blood was everywhere, but he couldn’t see her eyes anymore. Cynthia’s hair was matted with dark blood that seemed more black than red.

  Wally moaned on the floor beside his wife. He held his hands up and showed them to Edwin.

  “Looks like I really did it this time, eh, Jeffrey?”

  “What, Daddy?”

  “My hands. I got so angry that I split my knuckles and I think I broke my finger on her eye socket.”

  Edwin stepped over his mother’s corpse and knelt by his father. He was so proud of the man that was his dad that he beamed with delight, water seeping from his eyes.

  “Why are you crying, boy?” Wally shouted.

  “I just ...” Edwin’s voice choked off in his throat with emotion.

  “Just what?” Wally bellowed.

  “I just love what you did. Mom needed to know how you felt about her.”

  Wally lowered his head to the basement floor, a smile playing across his lips.

  “You’re a good boy, Jeffrey Harris. I’ll always remember that about you.”

  “I love you so much, Dad. You’ve taught me so much and made me so happy.”

  Someone knocked on the door upstairs.

  “Shit. They’re here.”

  A man shouted something from outside. Flashlights scanned the basement windows on the other side by the stairs.

  “Run upstairs. Go to the kitchen. Get the butcher knife out of the cupboard.”

  “For what?”

  “Just do as I tell you, boy.”

  Edwin hadn’t needed coaxing. He would do anything for his father. In under a minute, he’d made it back downstairs with the large chopping knife in his hand. The police had knocked two more times on the door, yelled to identify themselves and ask someone to open up, but Edwin ignored them.

  “You have to do something for me, boy. You listening?”

  Edwin knelt beside his father and nodded.

  “Run the knife across my throat. Run it deep. If it doesn’t work the first time, go back and forth like you’re cutting one of your peanut butter and jam sandwiches. Can you do that for me?”

  The thought made Edwin sick.

  “But that’ll hurt you, Daddy.” He started to cry. “That’ll hurt you bad.”

  “Listen to me, boy,” Wally shouted. The knock upstairs on the front door grew louder, more insistent. “I’m not going to no courtroom. I’ve saved your mother from that. Now you save me. Then all you got to do is scream and scream. They’ll come find you and take you to a new family and your life will begin. Take a family. Perform your own Gatherings one day as men are supposed to do. Follow in my footsteps. Just don’t make the same mistakes I made.”

  Something smashed the front door upstairs.

  “Do it now, boy. I’ll even hold the knife with you so it looks like I did it to myself. Don’t talk to them. Don’t admit nothing”—another bang upstairs— “just do this one last thing for me and then go and take all the women you want for the rest of your life and stay smart about it. You hear me, boy?”

  Through tears, Edwin nodded at his father.

  “And take our wedding rings. They’re yours. Take them as a memory, but also as a trophy of what happened here today. Remember boy, always take a trophy.”

  Edwin nodded, then took the knife and guided his father’s hand on the blade. It hovered above his father’s flesh for a brief second.

  “Thank you,” Wally whispered. “Thank you, son. Release me.”

  His eyes softened, filled with an inner glow, as an expression of contentment covered his face. He looked heavenward briefly, then closed his eyes.

  Edwin applied pressure and began to slice downward, nearly severing Wally’s head clean off with the first plunge of the sharp blade. Edwin hadn’t known how easy flesh opened up until that day when he had almost decapitated his father.

  By the time the police barged in upstairs, Wally was dead, the large knife still in his hand. His body had stopped convulsing seconds before the police bounded down the stairs, guns drawn, to find Edwin curled up in a corner, covered in blood, crying, their wedding bands safely secured in his pocket.

  They ushered him out of the basement as fast as they could. On the stairs, Edwin blew a kiss to his father and swore to himself that his father’s legacy would be continued. But unlike his father, Edwin would be smart. He would be patient. Not only would he learn all the tells a CSI agent looked for. He would learn how to cover them up, too. In addition, Edwin would do everything possible to be close to the investigations on himself, or even be a part of them.

  Wouldn’t his father be proud of him now? After all these years, and having taken five families without any consequences, Wally would have slapped him on the back and told him that Jeffrey was the man he had expected him to grow up to be. The man Wally had always strived to be.

  Edwin held his glass in the air to toast the memory of his father, then drank the last of the Scotch. It was time to turn in for the night. He would be busy before the party and then he would bring his new wife to her new home where she would be safe.

  He was doing her a favor by enriching her life wi
th him as Wally had for the women he’d taken all those years before.

  It was time for a little family Gathering and Edwin was ready. Jeffrey was ready.

  More than ready.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Jake turned up his driveway. The grocery bags were gone.

  What now?

  He moved to the side of the cement and edged closer to the house, going tree to tree, listening, smelling the air. A deer or some other large animal roamed to his right about forty yards away. Small animal scents like raccoons and squirrels wafted to him. How he could tell the difference in direction, size and shape, he had no idea. That was just the way it was now. Other than animals, he detected the smell of expended gasoline, oil from a car engine, and a radiator close by that was leaking coolant.

  He dropped to his knees and placed both palms on the ground in search of vibrations, but nothing was remotely close. A truck of some kind going over the train tracks half a mile up the road was all that came to him.

  So where had his groceries gone?

  Anger seeped back into his consciousness. After the fight in the sand pits, his energy had waned, the adrenaline had worn off, and he was tired, hoping to come home, call a window company, and nap until they arrived.

  But someone had absconded with his food.

  He advanced on the house, moving slowly in case the thief was still close, waiting Jake out, up wind. At the front door, he eased it open to find the grocery bags on his kitchen table.

  He frowned as he let the screen door close softly.

  “Hey,” a voice snapped behind him.

  Jake spun around, reflexively raising his hands and dropping into a defensive gesture. His old partner sat on his chair beside the couch.

  “Thought you might want your food put in the fridge,” Kirk said. “That was a lot of meat. Thinking about having the town over for a BBQ?”

  Jake lowered his hands and stood up straighter. “What are you doing here?” he asked.