The tide was going out, waves crashing in and then receding quickly, as constant as traffic, loud. The beach was flat, then dipped suddenly just before the surf, ran from there at a sharp angle to the water. As Kane approached the drop, he could only see Young’s torso. He was standing still, looking down. Seven or eight waves came in and rushed out again before Kane finally reached the crest of the drop. Once there, he could see Young from head to toe—could see, too, that there was something at Young’s feet, something wrapped in clear plastic.
It was a body.
Kane stared at it. Young was looking out over the ocean now, his back to Kane, his hands still in the pockets of his jacket. Kane once again looked up and down the beach, a little desperately now. He didn’t know whether he was hoping to see someone or not. But there was no one. He looked back at Young. The sound of the waves filled Kane’s head. He couldn’t think, took one step off the crest, misjudged the distance down, stumbled to the wet sand, almost fell but caught himself. The sand was packed down by the waves, was hard beneath his Skechers. Kane waited a moment, looked again at the body, dumbfounded. He put his hands in the pockets of his jacket, didn’t know what else to do, could think of nothing to say. He felt the recorder in the right pocket. He’d forgotten it was there, had forgotten everything—everything that was possible to forget.
The very edge of the waves as they rolled in reached the body and rushed around Young’s feet, churning into white foam. As the waves rolled back, Kane heard hissing from the sand. The water was shallow, not enough to move the body. But it was deep enough to reach Young’s ankles. It had to be cold, Kane thought, the water had to be freezing. But Young just stood there, showed no reaction at all when each wave came in.
“What’s going on, Bill?” Kane said finally.
Young didn’t answer. Kane took a few steps toward him. He was still a good ten feet away from Young and the body, didn’t really care to get any closer. But Kane wanted to see Young’s face, needed to, so he walked a kind of half circle around Young. When he had a view of Young’s profile, Kane stopped.
Much of Young’s face was in shadow, but what Kane saw was enough for him to know that Young was deep in thought.
“Bill, what’s going on?” Kane had to speak up to be heard over the constant waves and wind, the cave of sounds in which they both now stood.
“I read your books, Deke,” Young said. His eyes were fixed on the horizon. “They were good. You rely a little too much on repetition, but you would have grown out of that eventually, I think. I was pleased to see that I had influenced you. The language, the careful scene structure. Seeing that made me feel a little better about things. I wasn’t so much of a failure if I had taught you so well. The feeling didn’t last long, but . . .”
Kane said nothing, looked down at the body. He couldn’t see through the plastic sheeting, couldn’t see anything but the vague shape of a lifeless human form stretched out in the dark. He looked back at Young’s face.
“Whose body it that, Bill?”
Young ignored the question. Or maybe he hadn’t even heard it. “Colette read about you in the alumni newsletter. You were the first graduate to get published, so it was a fairly big deal. She gave me your books when they came out. I was proud of you.”
Young seemed tired, Kane thought, like someone finally at the end of a very long trip—or near to the end. A few steps more to go, but so tired.
And then another, different thought came to him.
“You knew Colette?” Kane said.
Young nodded. “Yeah. That’s how I knew what had happened to you. That’s how I knew about your son’s death, your bad case of writer’s block, where you lived. I’m sorry about your boy, by the way. I’m sorry for the whole thing, I really am.”
It took a moment, a long, confusing moment, but then Kane realized finally what it was Young was telling him, what all this meant. His heart came to a crashing stop in his chest, shattering to pieces.
A chill moved through him, colder than the night air around him, colder than anything he’d ever known.
“Oh, Jesus,” Kane said softly. He could barely form the words, barely give them enough air with which to leave his body. “You’re the Professor.”
Young looked at him, then nodded and looked back out over the water. “I wasn’t sure you knew about that. Colette told you?”
Kane said nothing.
“I was, it seems, a fool to have trusted her as much as I did. I’d known her for years, thought I knew her. I got her the job at that bar, used to frequent that place, back when I had money to spare, when I was someone. In her eyes I wasn’t such a failure. She was in awe of me, even with my life, even with what it had become. She was going to write a book about me, about our affair. Salacious, full of details, real Henry Miller stuff, thought that might put me on the map again. In return, I taught her everything I knew. I even sent her to take classes with you, thought she might learn something from one of my own disciples. But it seems that she had her own plan. I really thought I knew her better than that. Her betrayal wasn’t a twist I had anticipated. I should have seen it coming but didn’t. So I had to make some quick last-minute changes because of her.”
“You had her killed.”
“No, that was all Dean’s doing. But it forced me to move out from behind the scenes. I had to break into her apartment afterward and get some things. Lucky I did, too. She kept a journal on her computer; the file was sitting right there on the desktop. My name was everywhere. The whole plan, everything. A detailed record, like the whole thing was some research project of hers. I read through it all before destroying it. She made it sound like she was conflicted, like she wanted to stop me but was afraid. Like she had gotten in over her head and needed to do something about what was happening. That was pure fiction, I assure you. She was as involved in this as I was. She was tired of hiding from him. From her old chum Dean. If he was dead, he couldn’t make trouble for her for what she had done to him. She’d be free. Killing a few dirty-minded boys in the process wasn’t a problem for her. Hell, I think she even liked it. Deep down she had a contempt for all men, felt she was so much smarter than all of them, had control of them. She needed that, for obvious reasons. But, in the end, getting rid of Dean wasn’t enough for her. She wanted to get a book out of this. She wanted to tell it all and be the hero, make herself look good. I should have known she’d do something like this. Looking back, it fits perfectly, it’s her character, she couldn’t have done anything other than that. It was her nature. But I couldn’t see that. I was blinded—by her, by my own hate. It was a flaw that proved almost fatal to me. Almost. But all this doesn’t matter now. Her notes, everything she wrote is gone. All that is left for the cops to find is part of her memoir, the boring part dealing with her troubled childhood and sexually abusive father. Like the world needs another book on that subject.”
“You wrote the letter naming Krause, didn’t you? You left it for the police to find.”
Young nodded thoughtfully. “It was always supposed to be Krause. I even pretended to be Krause. Colette had introduced me to Dean as him. I dressed the part every time I went over to Dean’s house, in case his neighbors saw me. For all Dean knew, I was Krause.”
“You put that shirt in my apartment. And the blood in the chapel.”
“It wasn’t personal, Deke.”
“Whose blood was it?”
“The Dolan boy. We took him the night you passed out. That way you’d have no alibi. Colette kept you busy the next night, for the same reason. Like I said, it wasn’t personal. Krause got sick, and I needed to come up with something fast. What with what had happened to your son, and your bad behavior of late, you fit the bill pretty well. A clever use of a minor character, if you will. That’s always the sign of a careful writer. I taught you that, remember? If there was any other way to end this, Deke, I’d do it, you know that, right?”
Young looked at Kane then. There was real remorse in his face, in his shadowed eyes. Ka
ne could see it.
“It all has to fit neatly,” Young said. “The cops need to buy this.”
“Buy what?”
Young removed his right hand from the pocket of his jacket. Kane didn’t pay attention to it at first, his mind was too busy taking in all that he had just heard, trying to see where it was going, what it was Young was referring to, what he meant about the cops needing to buy this. But then Kane saw in his peripheral vision something shiny in Young’s hand and looked down, looked at Young’s hand for a long time as his brain struggled to process the irreconcilable contradiction of a genuine expression of regret on a man’s face, an old friend’s face, with a gun held firmly in his hand.
Kane’s thoughts all stopped then.
“Do me a favor, take your hands out of your pockets,” Young said.
Kane froze. He didn’t know anything about firearms, had never touched a gun in his life, but he’d seen enough TV and movies to recognize a .357 when he saw one. Young’s arm was extended, locked at the elbow, the gun aimed at Kane’s forehead. Kane winced as if he were looking into the noonday sun.
“Take your hands out of your pockets, okay?” Young said. “Let me see them.”
Chaos, like a sudden virus, ran rampant in Kane’s mind. Still, amid all those thoughts tearing into each other, colliding like atoms in a vacuum, one thing, one rational idea emerged.
Carefully, Kane felt for the recorder Mercer had given him, pressed the record button in with his thumb, then took his empty hands from his pockets, held them away from his body.
“I don’t imagine that you have any weapons, but do me a favor, zipper the pockets closed, okay?”
Kane pulled the zipper on each pocket, sealing them, then held his hands out again.
“I need you to come over here and unroll the plastic for me,” Young said.
“What for?”
“Just do it, Deke.”
Kane hesitated, looked at Young’s face, then the gun. He breathed once, twice, then a third time before he was able to move. His feet felt heavy, his legs numb. Finally he stepped to the body, knelt down beside it, searched the clear plastic till he found an edge, then stood, pulling as he rose. The body inside was heavier than Kane had expected it would be. The cloth gloves Young had given him didn’t grip the plastic well; the sheeting slipped from his hands several times. Finally, though, Kane curled up enough of the material to get a solid grip on it and pulled again. The body rolled over once, then again, and finally rolled free of the plastic.
It landed on its back. Half of the left side of its head was missing. There was smeared blood on the plastic in Kane’s hands. He tossed it aside, felt a chill colder than anything he had known in his life. Kane looked at the body, saw the exposed bone and brain, the dried blood covering its face. He wanted to look away but couldn’t. He had expected to see the face of a boy, a face that would remind him of his own son. But this wasn’t the case. What Kane was looking at didn’t make any sense at all.
And then, suddenly, horribly, it did make sense, in its own way, made sense of everything, or at least began to.
Lying dead on the wet sand was Dolan.
He was dressed in jeans and an army field jacket and work boots, dressed like Young, exactly like Young. Young removed his cap then, coarse white hair falling to his shoulders. He shoved the cap into the pocket of his jacket. Anyone who may have casually seen Young with Kane tonight, seen them leaving his apartment and getting into the Crown Victoria, might think Young was Dolan. Kane knew this, understood that this was the whole idea. He knew, too, that the black Jetta parked on Road D belonged to Young, and the Crown Victoria—with the administration sticker on the windshield and plastic Jesus on the dashboard—to Dolan. Kane stood there, unable to do anything but stare at Dolan’s lifeless face, dotted with blood and clumps of wet sand.
“Did you write your books with an outline, Deke, or did you do what I taught you, start with a character with a problem, a problem that needed to be solved, and find the story as you went along, letting it come from all the characters involved?”
Kane looked at Young. Was this what he really wanted to talk about now?
“What?” Kane muttered.
“You know, in the past ten years I haven’t been able to finish a book. I started many, over a dozen, would get as far as a hundred or so pages sometimes, think I was on to something—and then they’d just die on me. I’d lose what I thought I had, then spend months trying to start a new one. Those wouldn’t go anywhere, either. I’d lose the feel or have to admit to myself that I didn’t have a clue what it was the hero wanted. A hero without wants and you’re fucked from the start. So I endured false start after false start, year after year. I thought I was washed up, that whatever it was I had was gone, never to return. And then I remembered something. I remembered that my teacher, years ago, had lost his wife to cancer, a painful and protracted death, and for close to a decade he had been unable to write. Not a single word. He took the usual route—drinking, fucking. He even went to war, thought that might help, that might give him something to write about. But nothing. And then finally he awoke in the middle of a particularly dark night and realized that the problem was he hadn’t mourned his wife, that grief was in him but he refused to let himself feel it. And since he wasn’t feeling anything, wasn’t letting himself feel anything, he couldn’t write. If you can’t feel, you can’t write. It’s as simple as that.”
The urge to vomit came over Kane suddenly. He didn’t know if it was a delayed reaction to the sight of Dolan or something else. But his gut was empty, everything about him felt empty—his head, his chest, his veins, everything. Hollow. He tried to see Young’s face. Everything that was still recognizable about the man was lost in shadow now. Lost for good.
“It’s the risk we face,” Young said, “comes with the job. One day your mind will dry up and you won’t be able to write anymore, not like you used to. Christ, even Updike has slowed down. But to have it taken away, to have it ripped from you prematurely, unfairly, that’s something else. There’s just no living with that.”
Kane thought of the recorder running in his pocket.
“You hired Dean to kill all those boys, Bill. Why?”
“You can figure it out, can’t you, Deke?”
“I want you to tell me.”
Young shrugged. “I wanted him to feel loss.”
“You wanted who to feel loss?”
“I wanted the man who had taken everything away from me to know what loss is, what real loss is.”
“You’re talking about Dolan.”
“It’s a rage that never goes away, Deke. It’s always there. You can’t feel anything else. You try to drink it away, fuck it away. If there was a war, and if I were younger, I would have gone off to fight it. I would have done anything. Then one night I woke up, remembered what my teacher had gone through, saw the parallel. He was grieving his wife. I was grieving my life. He felt rage against God for taking his wife. But that wasn’t a luxury I allowed myself. I couldn’t blame it on a god I didn’t believe in. And, anyway, there was someone to blame, someone who was actually to blame for my loss. Rage requires action, rage needs the score to be settled. Since my complaint was with a flesh-and-blood man, and not some bearded father figure in the sky, there was something I could do about it.”
“Dolan got you fired from the college.”
“He did more than that. He ruined my life. How do you mourn the loss of a life, Deke? Not someone, but a life? I live in a three-room apartment. I teach at a community college. I can’t write a fucking word. The last ten years have been madness. And there was, I realized finally, only one way to put an end to it.”
“By killing the son of the man who wronged you.”
“You barely survived the death of your son, Deke, and his death was an accident. Colette saw the shit your life had become because of that. But what if someone had killed your son, had willfully murdered him, gone out of his way to murder him. And what if that someone w
as walking around, living a better life than you, thinking he had done God’s good work—what would you have done then?”
“That’s different, Bill.”
“Is it? You haven’t written a word in the four years since your son’s death. You’re full of grief and rage. I can see it in your face. It’s like looking into a mirror.”
Kane ignored that. “This doesn’t make sense, Bill. You have all these poor boys killed so you can kill Dolan’s son and get away with it. You set it up so the cops waste their time looking for some serial killer, and then you hand them clues leading to Krause. You do all this so you can hurt Dolan for ruining your life and walk away scot-free, and then you go ahead and kill Dolan anyway? It doesn’t make any fucking sense.”
“I didn’t just do this, Deke. I did my research, read all there was on the subject. I waited for the right situation, thought it through. I read in the paper that some idiot kid in California got drunk and walked into the ocean and drowned. That’s when I began to put this together. I was on sabbatical, had been told to get my act together or I was going to be fired. No Dolan there to push my dismissal through. So I was sitting in town, not far from your apartment, actually, trying to think of a way to do this, to kill Dolan’s son and cover my tracks. Then one day I saw Krause in town. A creepy old man, a foreigner, people would be quick to believe he could do something like this. I remembered his story—everyone knew his story. It was perfect. But he was an old man, weak. How could he pull it off? I knew from my research that most serial killers work alone, but there were some who worked in pairs. So I needed someone strong enough, someone who would have his own reasons for hurting young men. Colette had told me about Dean. I knew she was hiding from him, that she’d want him out of the way so she could live her life again. I told her my plan, and she saw what she could gain from it. The fact that Dean’s mother was a sometime prostitute who used to put cigarettes out on his face made him perfect for the job as a physically strong but morally weak henchman. I had everything in place. But the killings couldn’t just stop cold with Dolan’s kid. I knew that. A clever cop might wonder why that was and start looking for something to explain it, maybe look into the family’s past for someone with a grudge. I needed this to be clean, needed it to be perfect. I couldn’t replace rage with fear. That wasn’t going to help me one bit. Even with Dean dead and all evidence pointing to Krause, as I had originally planned, there needed to be a fifth boy, I needed the killings to end there. But then Dean got himself killed early, and the fifth boy got away, and there was the chance this boy would talk, tell the cops all about Colette. She was the one who lured him out so Dean could grab him. She’d arranged it before she was killed. She lured all the boys out. So there were suddenly two things that could connect me to this—my history with Dolan and Colette. Two things too many. Certain people knew about her and me, knew that she sat in on my classes. Add to that the fact that Krause, the old kraut, it turns out, is on his deathbed, and suddenly everything that could go wrong was going wrong. I’d come too far to turn back. I needed to come up with something that would satisfy the cops, give them reason to close the case. I needed to give them someone else with a grudge against Dolan, someone to blame all this on and call it a day.”
The Darkest Place Page 34