The Devil's Bed

by William Kent Krueger

  In the kitchen, the refrigerator was adequately stocked, though nothing in quantity. Fruit, yogurt, cheese, bagels, milk, juice. No leftovers. There were half a dozen chilled cans of beer, something called Pig’s Eye. The cupboards contained a modest supply of dishware, the basics. The small dining room table had only two chairs.

  In the bathroom, clean matching towels hung on the racks. The medicine cabinet held no prescription drugs.

  The first bedroom that Nightmare checked contained only a computer desk, computer hardware, and a chair surrounded by shelves of books. Thorsen appeared to have an even more inquisitive nature than Nightmare had realized. In the second bedroom, the bed was neatly made. All of Thorsen’s dirty clothing had been put in a wicker hamper. A paperback copy of Lonesome Dove lay on the nightstand. A makeshift bookmark, the ace of spades from a deck of playing cards, showed that Thorsen was nearly three-quarters finished, almost to the place where Gus bit the dust, a sad but truthful piece of storytelling. Thorsen had a large clothes closet. Half of it was used to hang suits, pants, and shirts. The other half was given over to a respectful housing of the uniform, armor, and sword of kendo, the Japanese art of fencing. Nightmare was intrigued that Thorsen was a man who apparently understood Bushido, the way of the warrior.

  In the whole apartment, Thorsen had but two photographs on display, both framed and set on the bureau in the bedroom. The first was a black-and-white blowup of a beautiful woman in a party gown. From the cut of the gown and the style of the woman’s blonde hair, Nightmare judged that the picture had probably been taken in the early 1970s. The picture was remarkable in one very particular way. In her face and in her Nordic build, the woman reminded him of Kathleen Jorgenson Dixon. Nightmare smiled and wondered if Thorsen even realized the similarities.

  The second photograph was a shot of an elderly couple with their arms tenderly around each other. In the background stood a barn sporting a new coat of red paint. Nightmare was almost certain there were more pictures somewhere. Everyone had a history, and almost everyone had that history documented in photographs, in certificates and diplomas, in ribbons from high school track meets and medals from the Scouts. Some people kept everything, others very little. But almost everyone kept something. Nightmare discovered Thorsen’s history in a big cardboard box under the bed.

  Nightmare sat on the floor and removed the lid from the box. Thorsen at first appeared to have come from a large family. A lot of the photographs were of kids, adolescents mostly, and the same couple and the same red barn framed on Thorsen’s bureau. The kids didn’t look at all alike. Some were blond, some redheaded, some raven-haired. They were tall and short, and their skins were of different tones and colors. Deeper in the box, Nightmare found more photographs of the woman in the gown whose picture sat on the bureau. In one, she had her arm around a kid who looked like Thorsen. Below those photos was a collection of articles cut from newspapers. They were about the murder of a St. Paul woman named Helen Lingenfelter. Although not particularly flattering, the photos that ran with the articles were of the same woman who had her arm around Thorsen. The newspaper stories mentioned a son, Bo, fourteen years of age, but no husband. Also in the box lay a document officially granting Bo Joseph Lingenfelter a legal change of name to Bo Harold Thorsen. Nightmare now understood the large family of disparate appearance. Thorsen had probably been taken into some kind of foster home after his mother’s death.

  Beneath the change of name, Nightmare came across a certificate of valor awarded to Thorsen by the U.S. Secret Service. Near the bottom of the box was a packet of letters bound together with string. They were all sent by the same woman, someone named Robin, from a D.C. address. They chronicled a distant courtship dance that ended when, in her final communication, the woman claimed to agree with Thorsen that a relationship was impossible for two people dedicated to a career in the Secret Service. The postmarks were nearly a decade old.

  The final item Nightmare drew out was an old sheet of lined, three-hole paper, the kind a kid might have had in a high school notebook. Carefully centered on the paper and written in capital block letters were three observations.

  THE WORLD IS HARD. BE STRONG.

  LOVE IS FOR ONLY A FEW. DON’T EXPECT IT.

  LIFE ISN’T FAIR. BUT SOME PEOPLE ARE. BE ONE OF THEM.

  Nightmare wasn’t certain of the significance, but he appreciated the sentiments. He put everything back into the box in the way he’d found it and returned the box to its place under Thorsen’s bed. Then he sat down to consider what he’d learned.

  Thorsen was a loner. He had no bowling trophies, no pictures of a softball team. He had only two chairs for dining and kept only basic dishware. Thorsen didn’t entertain much. Except for the letters from long ago, there was nothing to suggest romantic involvement. A man wedded to his job, Nightmare concluded. His small television and his large book collection indicated he preferred reading when he wanted to relax. His taste in books was eclectic, though not particularly original. Still, it suggested a thinking man, someone who might be willing to use an unorthodox approach in tackling a problem, and the fact that he read so widely in fiction suggested a fertile imagination. He had a tragic background, had suffered a painful loss at an impressionable age that left him without family. Although he’d managed to put together a life that had integrity and purpose at its heart, nothing about him seemed to trumpet happiness.

  The similarities between his own life and Thorsen’s were not lost on him. He felt a faint affection for the man, a rare thing for Nightmare. But that wouldn’t keep him from killing Thorsen if he had to.

  Nightmare had followed the agent to St. Peter the previous night and knew that Thorsen was now at the state hospital. Nightmare had taken the opportunity to better explore the nature of the man; the more he knew about an adversary, the less likely he was to be surprised. He’d come to Thorsen’s home because he knew that a home held secrets. Uncovering those secrets took him a long way toward understanding the enemy. It was a lesson he’d learned very young and in a horrific way.

  • • •

  It took Nocturne years to realize the monstrous secret of what lived above him in the old farmhouse.

  By then, he had created, at his grandfather’s direction, many more explosive devices. He liked the work. It was a game that tested both his mind and the steadiness of his hands. The devices had become increasingly complex and more powerful. Some the old man took and dealt with himself. Others, Nocturne was called upon to plant, usually at night, often after a long ride with his grandfather in the pickup truck. The old man said almost nothing on those drives, yet he seemed pleased with his grandson’s labors, and Nocturne, sitting beside the silent, white-haired man, felt proud of himself. The bombs he built destroyed things, but his grandfather had explained that those things were worthy of destruction. He’d given Nocturne reams of paper to read, his own scribbled manifestos. Sometimes he visited the basement and vented his theories of conspiracy. Even though Nocturne could easily see that his grandfather’s arguments were riddled with logical fallacies and fueled by hate, he held his tongue. The old man seemed to value Nocturne’s work and his company. Sometimes his grandfather would fix him with a steely gaze and quote from Proverbs, “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.” The words made Nocturne feel connected to the old man, important in his eyes.

  The basement door was almost never locked anymore. Those nights when Nocturne heard the padlock slipped into the hasp and snapped into place, he wondered: Had he done something wrong?

  From his reading, he’d come to believe that the essential mechanism of the universe was cause and effect. Everything existed as the result of one thing that triggered another that triggered another that triggered another. He believed that if one were diligent enough, one could trace back to an ultimate source the reason for all things. Although he often indulged in rumination on the broader considerations of existence, just as often he applied his thinking to more specific matters. The locked door, for example
.

  He was sixteen when he set out one night to discover the reason the basement door was periodically (and randomly, it seemed) locked. Winter lay around the farmhouse deep and still. A storm had just passed, and snow was piled against the outside walls, drifted taller than a man, sealing in Nocturne and his mother and grandfather. For no reason that Nocturne could discern, the old man had slapped the lock in place before going to bed. When the house above was quiet, Nocturne stripped naked, rolled his clothing in a bundle that he tied to a rope looped about his ankle. He worked his way up the laundry chute, out the opening in the second-floor bathroom, and hauled up his clothes. When he was dressed, he stepped into the hallway. He’d walked the old house at night so often he knew exactly where to step to avoid the loose, noisy floorboards, and he slipped silently down the hallway. He stopped at the old man’s room and listened. Inside, all was quiet. He carefully opened the door a crack. Although the curtains were drawn and the room lay in inky dark, Nocturne could see that the bed was empty. He closed the door, wondering. When he came abreast of the door to his mother’s bedroom, he heard a familiar sound, the harsh suck and sigh of air from his grandfather when the old man was laboring hard. That the sound came from his mother’s bedroom was bewildering to Nocturne. He reached for the knob. The metal was cold in his hand. He eased the door open. Although he knew he risked revealing his secret freedom, his curiosity was too great.

  The storm had left in its wake a clear, brittle sky shattered by a glaring moon. The curtains were drawn back. Moonlight thrust through the window and slashed across his mother’s bed. Nocturne stared, unable to comprehend what he saw.

  She lay on the bed, naked. Above her waist, she was in darkness, but moonlight splashed over her narrow hips, making the damp skin of his grandfather, who’d wedged between her legs, glisten like melting ice. The old man was bent over her, his pelvis in rapid motion. Nocturne’s mother lay rigid, staring at the ceiling above her, her eyes sightless as stones.

  Nocturne had read about sex. He understood it as he did many things, in a distant, literal way. The gritty reality before him defied his comprehension, and he stood in the doorway, dumb with confusion. He must have made a noise, for his mother’s eyes fell on him, and she caught her breath with an audible gasp.

  The old man stopped his thrusting and looked where she looked. He considered a moment, then pulled back from the woman. He climbed off the bed and stepped toward Nocturne. His penis was erect, huge and wet. His eyes were black, sharp and penetrating. “I suppose you’re old enough,” he finally said. He looked back at his daughter. “You want her, after I’m done, you take her.”

  “No,” she cried, weeping. “God, no.”

  The old man stepped back to the bed and slapped her across the face. “You’ll do as I tell you.”

  Although he didn’t fully understand the horror of incest, Nocturne understood his mother’s pain. He exploded with a howl, and he charged his grandfather in a blind rage, driving him back against a bureau. The old man struggled to defend himself. Finally he grasped a heavy jar from the bureau and swung it against the side of Nocturne’s head, shattering the thick glass. The boy dropped to the floor and entered into his beloved dark.

  He woke on the cold, cement floor of the basement. How much time had passed, he couldn’t say. His head hurt. He was thirsty. He stood up, dizzy, and made his way to the steps. Daylight seeped through the narrow gap between the bottom of the basement door and the kitchen floor. He tried to let himself out, but the padlock was still in place. He heard the floorboards of the kitchen creak. The padlock rattled and snapped free. The old man opened the door. Nocturne’s grandfather stood in a blaze of light and held a shotgun aimed at the boy. Nocturne squinted painfully and turned his face from the glare. The old man grabbed him harshly by the arm and pulled him into the light. He shoved Nocturne ahead of him toward the stairway, up to the second floor, down the hallway to the bedroom where Nocturne’s eyes had been truly opened. He forced his grandson inside.

  The curtains were drawn against the sunlight. His mother lay in bed, covered by a dirty, wrinkled sheet. She stared up at the ceiling. Her arms were outside the sheet, slightly spread away from her body, each wrist bound in white gauze that was stained red. To Nocturne she seemed an angel fallen to earth, an angel who’d come to rest on that old bed, an angel with red-tipped wings. She blinked, but she didn’t seem to be aware that her son was there.

  “Like her mother,” the old man spat. “Weak.” He stepped between Nocturne and the woman on the bed. “Are you like her? Or are you like your father?”

  Nocturne looked into the old man’s eyes and understood everything.

  He could feel a tearing inside, as if the flesh and the bone were splitting, as if he were giving birth to another self. From a place he’d never stood before, he looked back and saw the boy who’d walked with his mother in the beauty of the night, who’d held her while she wept at the sad music of the phonograph records, who’d learned a kind of happiness in the solitary dark with his books and his gadgets and his imagination and her as his sole companion. The new part of him looked at that child with deep contempt, for clearly the world was a different place, much simpler than he’d ever imagined. There were the powerful and there were the powerless. There were those who created nightmares and those who lived them. Nocturne had been one of the victims. But no more. In the world as he now understood it, there was no room for weakness.

  He faced the old man and he heard his own cold voice answer, “Like you.”

  Nightmare had been born.

  chapter

  nineteen

  I believe it was very soon after he discovered the incest that he killed his grandfather and his mother,” Dr. Hart said.

  “Whoa. He confessed to that?” During the story, Stuart Coyote hadn’t touched his coffee. It no longer steamed in the cup in his hands.

  “Another inference of mine.”

  “Killed them in anger? A sense of betrayal? What?” Coyote asked.

  “Where his grandfather was concerned, I think David considered it justice, retribution. In his world, there was no law but the law of his grandfather, and death the only recourse.”

  “And his mother?”

  “Anger at her betrayal is certainly a possibility. But I’m more inclined to think he believed he was setting her free.”

  “Anger’s got my vote,” Coyote insisted. “Christ, who wouldn’t have been pissed?”

  The patient who’d been working in the little garden in the courtyard stood up. Dirt circled the knees of his pants like brown patches, and he made a brief effort to brush himself clean. He looked down at the flowers he’d tended, then stared up at the sky that was fractured by wire mesh.

  “Keep in mind that David’s understanding of the world came largely from what he experienced in that dreadful house,” she said. “His knowledge of what was beyond his basement he’d acquired largely from his reading and the radio. It would be as if you or I were trying to understand the cannibals of Borneo simply from reading textbooks. I think he was more outraged by his mother’s suffering than by the incest. The killing ended her pain and his grandfather’s tyranny. In his mind, the act was reasonable and justified.”

  “How did he kill them?” Bo asked.

  “He blew up the house.” Her brown eyes strolled between Bo and Coyote. “Swift and terrible.”

  Bo shook his head. “This all seems predicated on believing what he’s told you. Do you have any facts that support his story?”

  “Facts?” She smiled patiently. “He was placed in St. Jerome’s Home for Children after he was discovered outside the burning remains of an isolated farmhouse in Isanti County. Investigators found explosives and other related materials in the barn. They determined David’s grandfather was a man they’d been attempting to trace for some time, a man who called himself Short Fuse. In letters to the media, he’d taken responsibility for nearly a dozen bombings over a three-year period. All this was almost a quarter of a cent
ury ago, but I’ve checked the newspaper accounts. As far as I can tell, no suspicion ever fell on David. He was quite clever, even then.”

  “Is he criminally insane?” Bo asked.

  “I would have expected his childhood experiences—neglect, abuse, exposure to incest—to contribute to psychosis. However, in David’s case, I believe what resulted would better be characterized as an alternative reality. He is, in many ways, predictable because he lives according to an ethos. Not one many people would necessarily condone, but certainly understandable.”

  “Help us understand,” Bo said.

  “All right. You or I might consider killing someone in a fit of anger. We don’t because we’re conditioned to believe it’s wrong to kill. In war, however, to kill becomes the moral imperative. For God, for country, for our comrades. And we hold in high esteem those who kill best. Think of David Moses as existing internally in a state of perpetual warfare. He kills not out of cruelty, but because it is in complete accord with the world as he understands it.”

  “If that’s true, why hasn’t he killed more?”

  “He intimated that he has. Many times.”

  “A serial killer?” Stuart Coyote asked.

  “Not if I’ve interpreted correctly what I’ve pieced together. A hired killer, Mr. Coyote. An assassin.”

  “A hit man?”

  “Dr. Hart,” Bo put in, “you said that before the killing in Minneapolis, Moses had no criminal record, is that right?”

  “None that we’re aware of.”

  “Men who do that kind of work are generally well known to law enforcement.”

  She didn’t seem at all inclined to withdraw her conjecture.

  “You believe all this?” Coyote asked incredulously. “Don’t you think it’s possible he fooled you? Or maybe that he was so deluded he made it all seem convincing?”