“I did tell you—the biggest boy reaped me!” Her mouth set, she turned back to her drawing. “The other big boy would’ve too—he wanted to do the littlest girl!—but the parents came home!”
Nicole, sadly, looked at the chaplain and opened her hands. They had the information they came for, so there was no reason to stay longer. They started for the door.
“And they’ll keep doing it!” Cassandra said in a voice not even recognizable. She also didn’t look up.
They both stopped and stared at the young girl who now was old far beyond her years.
“They hurt those other girls—I know it! Even that smallest little shit wanted to!” The girl, her friendly face absolutely gone, glanced toward them, then right back to her notepaper—which she then tore to shreds, “And that boy the same age as me, I know he wanted to! But the big boys wouldn’t let him!”
Chapter 28 The Engagement
“Rad, that girl was practically begging to go with us,” Nicole said as they turned north onto US #183 to again return them to Nebraska.
“I know, and I wish we could have taken her too.”
“You do?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Then hear me out, Rad.” Nicole reached over and squeezed the chaplain’s upper arm, then withdrew, “First we find Les Paul and dispatch him, then we go back to Kansas and adopt that girl.”
“Adopt?”
“Yes, we get married and then, with our professional status as private detectives, we shouldn’t have any trouble at all.” Nicole was talking really fast.
“Get married?”
“Yes, you’d like to marry me, wouldn’t you?”
“Nicole, I….” The chaplain glanced at the gorgeous woman on the other seat, then rubbed his chin, “I don’t know what to say. You would want to marry me?”
“Of course I would. Why do you act so surprised?”
Nicole said that so nonchalantly that the chaplain again glanced at her, and let out a breath, “I’m just…well, we’ve never talked about it. Why have we never talked about it, I wonder?”
“I guess I was hoping you’d bring it up. Of course we’ve been busy, one wild goose chase after another…”
“And yet you’re still with me.”
“Yes. I didn’t become your partner just to abandon you when the going got rough.”
“Yes. Sleeping in the van half the time—do you have any idea how many times...,” he hesitated.
“Yes? How many times what…?”
“How many times I’ve wanted to just roll one time and land in your arms?”
“No. How many?”
She smiled that delicious smile that the chaplain so loved to see.
“How many nights have we slept in the van?”
“That many, huh?”
She reached to his upper arm, and squeezed, “My God, Rad, you’ve been a wonderful gentleman. You’ve been the best.”
The chaplain patted her hand, “Thank you, Nicole.”
Nicole turned her hand into the chaplain’s, squeezed it, then turned back on her seat and faced the road, “We’ve been together for nine years, Radford, it…it’s time we get serious about our relationship. I’ve stayed with you for two reasons. The first one, of course, is to dispatch Les Paul, and the second…”
“Yes…?”
“You really don’t know, do you?”
“I….”
“It’s because of the kind of man you are, Rad. All these years you have looked at me, yes, I’ve noticed, and many times you’ve looked at me with a lust in your eyes, but you have never—well, you’ve touched me when the occasion necessitated, like my elbow, to get me going, or the back of my upper arm, or shoulder, and there have been times when you could have touched much more deeply and it would have looked like an accident, but you never did. Sometimes I have wondered if you just didn’t find me attractive.“
“My god, Nicole, of course I find you attractive.” The chaplain reached his hand out to Nicole’s hand and squeezed it gently, “I think you’re quite beautiful.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. How many hundreds of times have I felt so proud to be walking beside such a gorgeous woman, as you, and, to just slightly change the subject, ‘dispatch’…Les Paul…?”
“Yes, kill him—that’s why we’re tracking him…right?”
“We can’t just ‘kill’ him, Nicole—my god, then we’d go to prison too. I can’t believe you’d actually even think that way.”
“I know, Rad, and that isn’t, exactly, how I think. The killing would have to be clandestine, and we’d have to get rid of the body…” She hesitated, then laughed.
“Okay, I know you’re kidding, Nicole, but don’t you see? If we were to—just—kill him that would be the same as the state killing him.”
“No, that can’t be.”
“Yes, it would be. He has to die by the hand of any other than the state, or the state’s representative—us, in this case.”
“So, what? We have to just keep tracking him…till when? Forever?”
“For now, Nicole, we just have to find him, and determine it is him.”
“Oh, it’s him.” Nicole dropped the chaplain’s hand and crossed her arms, “From what people have been telling us, the evil they feel from him—it’s him all right.”
“I think it is too, but still, we have to be sure. Then we can decide what to do.”
Nicole uncrossed her arms and faced him again, “So what about us getting married? There’s probably a time limit, I mean, we probably have to be married for a while before we can adopt.”
He looked over at her. Her smile, to him, was the light of his world. He knew he should try to express that to her…somehow,” Are you sure, Sunshine?”
“I am, Rad, here—“ She held out her hand, “Hold my hand. You can drive with your left, and very soon, when we lay our heads down, I am going to show you just how much you mean to me.” Again, that entrancing smile.
****
From her window Cassandra could just see Nicole’s minivan leaving. Then she sat down with a new sheet of paper. Soon she had drawn a nice picture of a white house, a big yard, a tall green tree, and three stick-figures: A man with white hair, a woman a little shorter with long brown hair, and a little girl wearing a yellow dress. She whimpered, a sound she never made because she knew it showed weakness, but she whimpered again, and choked, slightly. Her eyes felt strange, like maybe tears wanted to come—but she blinked several times, and then she screamed silently within herself and stopped them, and roared just in her own mind, and crumpled her nice drawing of three happy people by their happy little home, then she uncrumpled the paper and tore it into many little pieces.
She knew about tears; she knew what they were, but she was pretty sure there were none in her!
Her teeth were gritted so hard and her mouth was so tight it almost hurt. Why are those people looking for Baby Boy-Doe9?—and what a stupid, stupid, name! Did they want to take him home to his real parents? Where he would live happily ever after? Why didn’t they come for her instead? She held her dolly more tightly to her front. Nicole was so nice. Why couldn’t she love ME? She whimpered again, and those tears really wanted to come, but little Cassandra would not let them. Somewhere far back in her mind she knew tears did not help a thing, and that if she ever let herself start crying she would never stop—
“Cassie!” the woman’s voice. She had never told that woman she could call her ‘Cassie’ yet she did, and she hated her for it. “Cassie!” the woman called again, sounding impatient, “Come eat your supper!”
She knew she had to go. She turned and started to rise, and stopped, and felt her eyes grow big and then get regular again, and her mouth tightened.
The man, staring at her, stood in the doorway. His left hand held onto the framework of the door.
“Cassie!!!! You come and eat! Right now!”
The man dropped his hand and stepped back. She held onto her doll, rose, and ra
n past him to the kitchen, and would have sat down right away. But the woman said something that drove the wedge—that had been there between them from the start, but only partially driven—all the way, “Cassie, you need to start growing up a little. You don’t need that doll with you wherever you go. You’re nine now…that’s right, isn’t it? You’re nine, right?”
“Yes.” If she could possibly have laughed right then she would have.
“So a nine-year-old doesn’t need to drag a doll around everywhere she goes, so you take that thing back to your room and then come back and eat.”
Cassandra tightened the doll against her front but did turn. Now the man stood in the kitchen doorway.
“Franny, let her past,” the woman said.
The man grinned but did step aside.
She hurried to her room and laid her doll with her head on the pillow and pulled the other, smaller, pillow to her side, then grabbed her jacket from the back of the chair and put it over her doll and tucked it into her side, then leaned over and kissed her only friend, “I’ll be back soon, Rachel Ray.”
Chapter 29 Last Foster Home
Les Paul stood waiting with his handler at the entrance to his next home. The handler had both hands on his shoulders. Les Paul didn’t like being touched. He had never liked the touch of the many adults—men and most women both—that had been in and out of his life as long as he remembered…
He saw himself surrounded by many people, maybe hundreds. They were dressed funny. Most clothing was dark, many had hoods. There were no bright colors or styles, just people staring at him. Then he realized his hands were not only shackled in front of him but they were clamped in some sort of wooden contraption…so was his head.
An official-looking man appeared, official because he was dressed differently from all the people watching. The man looked at him but said nothing, then looked to the side and nodded. He sensed something happen to the contraption that held him. It shuddered slightly, then a blast of wind as the steel blade dropped with a ‘Chunk!’ For just a split second as his head dropped and rolled he could see up, could see the blood spurting from his decapitated body.
Les Paul’s handler knocked again on the door, which was heavy-appearing and made from fine wood.
The scene in his head passed. He dismissed it, as he always did, but, lately had begun to wonder more strongly about those occasional strange daydreams he had. But they were happening more than occasional, and he knew they weren’t normal daydreams. He knew what a real daydream was: things he wanted to think about and dream about. But those thoughts that came out of nowhere, of what he had done or imagined he had done, in some long ago, far off, distant time and country…sometimes he wondered if the memories actually could be his, other times he fiercely denied them. He was even too young to have committed such atrocities. Strange the word ‘atrocity’ would even pass his thoughts. He had just learned the word, had heard it on television when a judge was lecturing some criminal for some bad thing the criminal had done, some ‘atrocity’ the criminal had performed. But Les Paul considered those so-called atrocities as games, and fun.
The door opened and a very pretty lady, about forty, appeared, wearing a short black dress—dressed for the evening?—and blonde, very blonde. Instantly he saw her clothes disappearing. In seconds she was down to panties and bra. Panties and bra he had seen before. What, exactly lay beyond panties and bra resided only in his imagination. Sometimes he would imagine the girls and women he had known as having a penis, something like his own, but he was pretty sure it was probably something different. As for the top part, well, he suspected they looked much like his own immature chest, just swelled quite a bit, depending on the age and size of the girl or woman. But even though he didn’t know what, exactly, to expect their naked body to look like, every pretty girl or woman he met from ages six to about fifty or sixty, he undressed in his mind. He had no real comprehension about the age of his women but he definitely knew if they were pretty, or not, and only the pretty ones did he undress.
The really, really, young, girls he undressed very quickly, just to get it over with, like he felt he shouldn’t even be undressing them—and he saw the very immature child’s body as blank, with no shape, something that shouldn’t even be seen by a man. It always gave him a quick reminder of that really far, far, far, back, memory—the good one he continued denying belonged to him, yet kept having it—of his own woman and little girl child. He would always vehemently dismiss the woman and the little girl child. He couldn’t possibly have a memory where he had a wife and child…and that was his only saving grace, that in his sex habits—till then—sex habits he didn’t even have yet—he wanted only grown women, not children, but, given the consequences to his sex habits—not the consequences to himself, but to his victims—liking grown women over children really wasn’t much of a saving grace.
But it was something.
He wondered sometimes why he wouldn’t like girls his own age and then, always like an instinct, thought back to that very earliest of his memories. Strange, even though he didn’t believe those awful memories were even his, or the good ones, the fact he could sometimes remember them on command seemed even stranger. But he didn’t care and again, from out of nowhere this time came that far, far, back memory…he was in a cave. Of that he was sure. It was damp; it was night; he was naked except for a skin of some dead animal hung over his shoulder and another around his middle. A woman, his woman, worked by a fire preparing food. He even felt hungry watching. Another woman, a very, very, young woman, a child, a girl child, his darling little girl child played near the fire, with a roly-poly wolf puppy. The puppy made his darling little girl so happy. This was his family. It was a happy scene. Among his many memories, these few moments were maybe the very best he had ever experienced.
Then three strange men entered the cave, and a woman! He reached for his lance, but too late, as one of the men immediately held a lance’s tip to his throat. Another of the men carried a brutal club and hit his woman with it, and spilled the cooking pot. The wolf puppy barked and barked and growled. One of the men stabbed it, then his little girl child screamed and tried to run. The unknown woman grabbed her and held onto her and presented her backside to the third man who lifted the skin covering his middle…he grabbed the lance at his throat and would have won it but the second man used his club and hit his arm, then the first man used his lance, this time ramming it into his throat, then out, then hard into his chest.
He felt his life blood leaving him and he fell, but was able to raise enough to see both his woman and his darling little girl child being brutally raped and then drug away. His blood continued to flow from his body; his eyesight began to dim as the campfire died. His last memory was the sound of his little girl child screaming ‘Daddy!’ and so ended his first life.
And as his essence entered that next sack of sperm and eggs all in his brain was the plan to kill men, many, many, men, for raping his woman and his darling little girl child, and women! He would rape and then kill even more women because of the act of that one woman who had betrayed even the concept of love by causing the rape of his darling little girl child…
This one memory Les Paul hung onto even though his mind was spinning, trying to deny the memory was his. How many times had he denied these memories? Why did they keep coming back? Intruding on his life? Why?...
In your life, and all your lives that have followed, yes, you will have killed many, many, men, and many MORE women after you raped them, and especially anyone who would hurt a little girl child. As your endless parade of lives have gone on and on and your endless killings have gone on and on, they have become a constant battle between good and evil, with evil always before winning out.
The thoughts came as if they were truly his, like an inborn instinct, like an animal’s, like a special message to him. He simply did not understand, except that no way would he ever harm a little girl child. That one memory of his darling little girl child that he loved beyond anyt
hing else he accepted as his. Such was his saving grace.
Les Paul shook his head and forced the memories and thoughts away. He HATED them yet he also was beginning to sometimes love them. It all was so confusing…
The very pretty lady in the black dress with the blonde hair lightly patted his head.
What was left of the memories dissipated. This woman’s touch he did not mind.
“Hello there, young man,” she said, “How are you?”
Instantly she became clothed again. “I’m fine,” he answered, and continued looking at her. She maybe was the most beautiful woman he yet had seen in his very short life.
He still hadn’t looked up those words ‘reap’ and ‘rape.’ Dictionaries were always available in the schools he went to but at age nine—and the very limited amount of education he was willing to absorb—he had not yet learned to use a dictionary, efficiently. But somehow he felt to ‘rape’ or ‘reap’ had something to do with this very pretty woman’s body reduced to panties and bra, and then nothing. Maybe with this woman he would find out.
The woman leaned slightly and held out her hand to Les Paul, and glanced at his handler, “Baby Boy-Doe9? Such a strange name.” Her smiling face went sober, then smiled again when Les Paul grasped her hand, and shook it.
She squeezed his hand then released and stood straight again, “Why such a strange name?” she asked his handler.
“He was abandoned as an infant at St. Winston Hospital at Wayne Ridge, Nebraska, Ma’am, without a name attached to his basket, and—“ Les Paul felt a tremor move through his handler “—I guess, nobody has just ever given him a real name.”
“Nebraska?’” the woman asked, “What—“
“Actually this is a request from Nebraska, Ma’am.” Les Paul’s handler said, “We are at the moment overrun with children. We simply don’t have enough foster parent volunteers, so—and I don’t have all the details—but I guess my state got in touch with yours…surely you’ve received that special paperwork….” His handler didn’t finish, just hunched his shoulders. Les Paul didn’t actually see that but felt it, and the thought ran through him, Did that guy tell the truth? But he didn’t care. One foster family was the same as another.
The Light at the End of the Tunnel Page 12