The Highly Effective Detective Crosses the Line

by Richard Yancey

  “So did he join for protection or because he shared their beliefs?”

  “Both. Though probably it was more about the former, based on what happened later and what I know about Quinton’s personality.”

  “What happened later?”

  “He turned on them. Became a snitch. The DA got involved, the FBI, the whole shebang. Nailed the head honcho here in Brushy, inmate named Richard Rache. Needless to say, Ritchie’s not too happy with Quinton. Heard through the grapevine there’s a fifty-thousand-dollar price tag on his head.”

  “He had a change of heart?”

  “He chose the side that could give him more than they could: a private cell, round-the-clock protection, special goodies not afforded the general population, and a reduction in his sentence. Cut it by almost a year.”

  “He was anxious to get out?”

  “He didn’t like it here. Not many do.”

  “You said there was something else, another reason why you think he ratted them out.”

  “Quinton Stiles is a hater, Mr. Ruzak. Don’t get me wrong. Blacks, Latinos, Asians, men, women, children, hell, even dogs, for all I know. Makes him a racist, sure, but he’s an equal-opportunity supremacist: This young man hates the whole world, black, white, brown, yellow, and every hue in between. I think he would be perfectly happy to see everyone and everything in it burn.”

  “Can I talk to him?” I asked. “Rache.”

  He shrugged. “If you want. I should warn you, though. You’ll want to take a nice long shower afterward.”

  12:10 p.m.

  Afterward, I met with the prison psychiatrist in an office that was even smaller than the warden’s. Bookshelves groaning with fat hardcover textbooks lined three walls. The fourth was festooned with diplomas and awards and pictures of the doctor with people who looked vaguely familiar, whom a visitor was probably supposed to recognize as being significant. I couldn’t put a name on a single one.

  “So how’s Ritchie?” he asked.

  “He was very interested in my ancestry.”

  The doctor, whose name was Liebermann, laughed.

  “I bet he was. He refuses to talk to me. My people control the entire world, but I understand our days are numbered.”

  “Pretty much everyone’s are,” I said. “Including Quinton Stiles’s.”

  “Let me guess. Rache doesn’t know where he might be, but he offered you something for that information.”

  “There’s a lot of animosity there.”

  “Quinton broke the sacred code of all convicts. If I were him, I’d make myself very scarce, too.”

  “Which he has. You treated him. What can you tell me?”

  “You understand, Mr. Ruzak, technically Quinton is no longer my patient, but some issues are still protected by doctor-patient confidentiality.”

  “Right,” I said. “And I wouldn’t even ask you to go near that line if it wasn’t important.”

  “Of course.”

  He waited. His eyes were small but dazzlingly blue, maybe the bluest eyes I had ever seen. They seemed to glow beneath his shaggy eyebrows.

  “I don’t know where he is,” he said.

  “But you know what he is.”

  “My diagnosis? Is that what you’re after?”

  “I’m just casting out a net.”

  He leaned back in his chair. It answered with a protesting screech. His bald spot, framed by salt-and-pepper hair that gave off a serious monk vibe, shone in the fluorescents.

  “It is rare,” he said slowly, “in my experience and in the literature, for even your most violent offender to exhibit the characteristics of a true psychopath.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Or of the violent psychopath, I should say. Most psychopaths are not. But there is a very rare subset of what we call ‘malevolent psychopathy.’ ” He pronounced it si-CAH-pathy. “Serial killers would fall into that category, as well as spree killers. Andrew Cunanan, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Eric Harris of Columbine fame—or infamy. They get all the press, which gives the illusion that it is a more prevalent disorder than it really is.”

  “Thank God.”

  He nodded thoughtfully, a slightly ironic grin playing on his lips.

  “Yes. Thank God. What makes malevolent psychopaths so dangerous is their ability to mimic normal human behavior. Consider Gacy running his successful construction business or Ted Bundy the law student and part-time crisis-line counselor. They are excellent mimics of normal human emotion, but it’s all an act. Some, of course, are better at it than others. But all are manipulative, highly narcissistic, and brilliant liars. There’s a misconception among layman that psychopaths walk around wearing the mask of normalcy, but that isn’t a very good description. Wearing a mask implies the true self lies beneath—that other emotions are going on behind the surface. The better analogy is to compare them to an onion. There is nothing once the layers are stripped away.”

  “What about an emotion like hate?”

  “Rage would be closer to the mark. Intense anger, never directed inward as with depressives, but always radiating out from a calculating center.”

  “How is it treated?”

  “There is no treatment, Mr. Ruzak.” He leaned forward in his chair, and his eyes shone like the light of buoys on a moonless night. “No therapy exists that can help a psychopath, pharmaceutical or otherwise, nothing but time and a little luck.”

  “Luck?”

  “Somebody stops them before they can wreak too much havoc. Someone kills them or the state does, or locks them away for the rest of their lives. There is no cure. There is removal from society and there is death.”

  “Another kind of removal.”

  He sat back. Screeeech went the chair.

  “Quinton attended anger-management classes until I reached my diagnosis. After that, I decided his time would be better spent on kitchen duty.”

  “Kitchen duty?”

  “Quinton loves knives.”

  1:43 p.m.

  I called Felicia from my cell on the drive back to Knoxville. Heat puddles shimmered on the highway and the air was thick. I was covered with sweat after the three-minute walk to my car.

  “I don’t know where he’s disappeared to, but now I know why he’s disappeared.”

  “One step closer to the pointless goal.”

  “Not altogether. Farrell is right on the money: Isabella’s got every reason to be afraid.”

  “Because he beat her nearly to death and spent three years in prison for it?”

  I nodded. She couldn’t see me, but I nodded. Why do people do that? “And here’s the why: He turned on some very bad people in the hoosegow and there’s a fifty-thousand-dollar bounty on his head.”

  “Did you just use the word hoosegow?”

  “He’s not lying low because he’s plotting something. He’s lying low because he’s afraid.”

  “Well, this is a good thing, Ruzak. He’s probably a thousand miles from Tennessee. You can relax. Farrell can relax. Everybody can relax.”

  “Not everybody,” I said.

  “Oh boy.”

  “It doesn’t take a genius. One person knows for sure where he is, or at least how to get hold of him. If it occurred to me, it’s going to occur to people like Kein Mitleid.”

  “Did you just sneeze?”

  “I’m sure he’s warned her, but—”

  She blew. “Jesus Christ, Ruzak, do you even listen to the words coming out of your own mouth? So now it’s not about protecting Isabella; it’s about protecting the psycho’s mother? Why don’t you just buy some land in Montana and build a compound? Stock up on can goods and hunker down for the apocalypse.”

  “I think,” I said, trying to choose my words carefully, “I think, though, it’s ventured into the territory of moral obligation.”

  “Oh bullshit.”

  “She deserves a heads-up is all I’m saying.”

  “And you need a two-by-four laid upside yours. What am I going to do with you,
Teddy? You’re so beyond my capacity.”

  “I would really hate to think that.”

  “Listen to me, Ruzak. Are you listening to me? You can’t save her. You can’t save her and you can’t save Isabella and you can’t save Farrell. Hell, ultimately you can’t even save yourself. Nobody can.”

  “That’s neat,” I said. “That’s very tidy.”

  “Don’t get on your high horse with me, buddy. You don’t give a flying flip about this woman; she’s nothing to you. You spout off about moral obligations, but it’s just a cover; it’s what you tell yourself so you don’t have to admit that all this Good Samaritan crap is really about your feelings of inadequacy and loneliness and self-loathing. Maybe she is in danger, but it isn’t any threat to her that’s got you worried.”

  “Self-loathing?” I was shocked.

  “You want to talk about morality? How moral is it to use other people to exorcize your own personal demons?”

  It dawned on me. “You’re worried about me.”

  “Oh God. Oh my God.”

  “Does it really matter what the motive is?” I wondered aloud. “Like in a criminal trial, the prosecution doesn’t have to prove motive, just that X did Y. It doesn’t matter. The means always justify the end.”

  “I’m going to point something out to you, Ruzak. You like laying down the hypotheticals; let me lay this one down on you: The means you’re using might bring about the very end you’re trying to avoid.”

  “Back to poking the anthill?”

  “You keep nosing around in this shit and pretty soon someone is going to get hurt. Then what are you going to tell yourself? ‘Oh, I did my best; I tried. Somebody got waxed, but gosh, look how nobly I acted!’ ”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why are you so sore?”

  “It happens, Mr. Detective, when someone watches a person they care about do stupid things for stupid reasons.”

  My face felt warm. The rest of me didn’t.

  “Are you speaking hypothetically?” I asked.

  She hung up on me.

  8:41 p.m.

  I swear that ten minutes talking to my dog makes me feel better than forty-five with my therapist. Dogs listen. They don’t try to interrupt. They don’t ask leading questions. They don’t force you into confronting anything or back you into corners. They don’t want to make you better; they just want you. The you you are, not the you everybody else wants you to be or even the you you may think you want to be. There’s something holy about that, and I don’t care if it sounds blasphemous. Of course there are mean dogs, just like there are mean people, but I’m convinced that your average dog has more hope of redemption than your average human. Another semiblasphemous thought. Maybe psychopathy exists in canines, but if it does, it probably is even rarer in them, and even then it is probably, unlike with us, curable.

  We had had a hard time bonding, Archie and me, for which I blamed myself. It wasn’t his fault he was a pound puppy, abandoned to a companionless fate inside a three-by-three-foot cage. I took it pretty hard at first, his refusal to hand over his undying devotion. I always had this stereotypical idea of dogs as being slavishly, even wantonly, affectionate. I never stopped and thought it was a relationship just like any relationship. It needed time, nurturing, a crumbling of the barriers we had both erected on the road to intimacy.

  A typical night: I step inside the door and he’s on me (I didn’t ditch his crate, but as a show of my trust, I leave the door open when I head out in the morning, on those mornings when I don’t take him to work). His thin brown-and-white tail is a blur, his tongue hangs from his mouth, and he stands on his hind legs and pushes his front paws against my belly. He hops and yips when he sees the leash in my hand. I take him down the stairs (I’m still dodging the building super) to the little plot of grass beside the Sterchi, and then up again for dinner, which he destroys in about thirty seconds and then spends the next four minutes licking the bowl, in an attempt to make me feel guilty, and farting. Usually, we fall asleep together on the sofa, but he always gets up before I do and goes to his crate. Sometimes I’m awakened by the sound of him gnawing on his favorite toy, a little lamb squeaky I bought the first day he came to me. I force myself off the sofa, say, “Good night, Arch,” and stumble off to bed. I don’t see him again until morning, unless there’s a storm overnight, which brings him to my bedside, where he will sit and whine and put one paw on the mattress, as if to say, Make the thunder go away, will ya?

  The very good thing was that we both liked the same shows. I’d read dogs can’t really watch TV, because the images are two-dimensional, or something like that, but I didn’t buy it. Archie loved television. He understood the difference between the show and the commercials. During the commercials, he got up and went to his water bowl, or laid his head on my lap and looked up into my face. Sometimes he would leap from the sofa and scratch urgently on the door for a quick walk the minute the program went to a commercial. Hurry, before it comes back on! His favorite shows were Dirty Jobs and any movie with Kate Hepburn. I was convinced he had a crush on her. Or maybe something about her voice reminded him of a former owner. Archie couldn’t get enough of Kate. On the anniversary of our companionship, I bought him The African Queen. He watched it three times through with nary a potty break.

  So he wasn’t too happy when I broke our routine (number-one secret for keeping your dog happy: routine) and sat down at the computer. I left the TV on for him, but I guess it wasn’t the same watching it by himself. For several minutes, he sat beside me, staring up at my profile. When the beseeching look failed, he put a paw on my thigh. I absently brushed it off. Another few minutes went by, during which he may have been debating whether to act out to get my attention or acquiesce to change. Finally, he chose the latter, and forced my leg to one side so he could crawl under the desk and lie down. I felt the weight of his head on my foot as I crawled through the Web.

  Google took me right to the group’s main site. There was a forum and streaming videos and flashy graphics. The words We’re About LOVE, Not HATE! scrolled across the top of the home page. One link brought me to something called the Twenty-Five Points, a kind of platform or manifesto. I read most of them aloud to Archie.

  I watched a video of a book burning. About a dozen people—mostly men in their twenties, though I did see one older guy with a crew cut—milled around a bonfire while some teenagers tossed in the books. I couldn’t make out any of the titles. A pretty dark-haired girl raised her hand in the Nazi salute. We’re About LOVE! I watched a slide show of a march in Ohio. Black jackets, jackboots, pockmarked faces, shaved heads, armbands, and lots and lots of tattoos. Though the pictures had been carefully selected, I could tell the protestors outnumbered the marchers. I read a couple of forum posts. The president had a plan to strip them of their God-given right to bear arms. This was followed up by practical advice on where to get the best deals on semiautomatics, in short supply, apparently, due to the run on gun shops. There was a link to learn how to get your teenager involved in the movement. I didn’t click on it.

  Instead, I clicked on the link for the local Tennessee chapter. There was no address or phone number, just an e-mail address. I typed a note, and my finger hovered over the mouse button. It felt like offering my hand to the devil.

  “They already have my IP address,” I said to Archie. “Probably there’s an imbedded virus on my computer, scanning all my files as we speak. In two days, the FBI will be knocking on my door, but it’s not like I’m making a donation or anything. Sometimes to catch a devil you gotta lie down with one.”

  He must have sensed my agitation. He left the sanctuary beneath the desk and laid his head on my thigh. He sighed. It was almost nine; a new episode was airing tonight: Mike was working at a dog food–processing plant. How could I possibly miss it?

  I clicked the send button.

  WEDNESDAY

  10:53 a.m.

  Felicia watched without expression as I shuffled over the threshold, cradling the
box of Krispy Kremes, with two cups balanced precariously on top. I closed the door with my foot, half-stepped my way to her desk, set the box down, put one of the cups to the side, lifted the other and removed the lid, blew on the tan surface for a few seconds. Her eyes never left my face.

  “Doughnuts,” I said.

  I opened the box and removed one—warm and sticky—took a bite, chewed.

  “Can I ask you something?” she said.

  I nodded, touched my lips to the cup’s lip.

  “Why do you buy that coffee? We have coffee here.”

  “It’s Starbucks.”

  “I thought you liked Starbucks.”

  “I do like Starbucks.”

  “So why is it every time you pick up doughnuts you get coffee, too?”

  “It’s about pairing. You wouldn’t serve Chablis with filet mignon.”

  “So that’s why you’re late? You made a doughnut run?”

  “I noticed the Hot sign was lit.”

  “How did you happen to notice that? You live downtown and the Krispy Kreme is way west on Kingston Pike.”

  Another bite. And a sip.

  “Don’t you want a doughnut?” I asked.

  She leaned forward and her chin came up a little as she kept her eyes on my face. The motion caused her blouse to puff out; I could see the fathomless cleft between her breasts. My mouth was sugary and warm and, upon my tongue, there was a hint of bitterness from the coffee.

  “Why are we celebrating?” she asked.

  “We’re celebrating?”

  “You always pick up doughnuts when you think you’ve accomplished something.”

  “I do?”

  I wasn’t sure, but it appeared to me she was trying not to smile.

  “Momma Stiles told you where he is,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Isabella told you.”

  “No.”

  “Meredith Black called you. He’s been arrested.”

  “No.”

  “He showed up at your apartment and you shot him in the back of the head.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “He showed up at Farrell’s and he shot him through the back of the head.”