CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
AD Jones sits in the living room, watching me. I called; he came. Mercy Lane remains shackled and silent. Tommy is tense. Kirby is bored. “Sir?” I venture.
I can’t decipher the look he’s giving me. It seems weary and angry and rage-filled and sad. There is no confusion. It’s as though he’s been expecting to find himself in this place. He is not surprised, but he longs for all the moments that came before.
“I’m going to do something here,” he says to me, finally speaking. “Just this once.” He surveys Dali/Mercy, who is unperturbed. “Because she took your finger and your hair. Mostly, because you didn’t pull the trigger, which means you’re still a person to me.”
I swallow and nod. I’m unable to speak. My throat is choking suddenly with the force of unshed tears. Grief has replaced my desire to kill. My finger and my hair, he says out loud, but those just stand for all the other things, the things he means but has left unsaid.
“This is it, Smoky,” he continues. “This is what you get in return for what you’ve lost. This one pass. Just this once. You understand me?”
My eyes tell him that I do.
“Okay,” he says. “Here’s what’s going to happen.”
It was a simple lie, the best kind. I’d gone to AD Jones with my suspicions about the identity of Dali. He’d given me permission to poke around on my own. Everything else followed on the heels of that. The reverse GPS. The trip to Vegas. The confrontation based on manufactured probable cause.
Mercy Lane will be taken into custody by the AD and flown back to Los Angeles on the jet. Kirby will fade into the background, never here. Tommy and I will drive home while the AD flies in Callie and others to oversee evidence collection.
It’s a rickety story, full of holes, ready to leak, but it’ll be enough. We know how to break the law. It’s something you do quietly, with few witnesses, and only ever with those you trust.
“Your involvement has to be at a minimum from this point on,” he says to me. “I’ll handle everything else.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He sighs. The rage is gone; just the sadness remains. Watching him be sad is like watching rain fall against a mountain. Something solitary. He folds the sadness away after a time, back inside himself, and the rain ends. Just the mountain remains, eroded by such moments.
Mercy Lane clears her throat, attracting our attention. “Let’s bargain.”
AD Jones frowns at her. “What the fuck do you have to bargain with?”
“I’ve been weighing all the variables, and you haven’t left me with any options. You’re going to find evidence of the GPS tracker here, as well as other things. I could try to tell a story about kidnapping and attempted murder by the FBI, but I wouldn’t be believed. The only thing left for me to control is the comfort of my incarceration and whether or not I live or die.”
“It’ll be hell and then you’ll die,” Kirby chirps. “Count on it.”
Mercy ignores her. “The easiest way to lie is to not have to lie at all. If you’ll concede to certain comforts and agree not to pursue the death penalty, I’ll confess freely and accept whatever prison time you want to impose. Our stories will match and no one will ever be the wiser.”
She’s calm, reasonable, cold. AD Jones gapes. I touch his arm with a hand.
“You confess here, now, on video,” I say. “It has to be bulletproof. And you go to jail forever.”
She inclines her head. “Agreed.”
This is Dali, this is Mercy Lane. The face of pragmatism. Survival is the only prize worth having.
“I don’t know,” AD Jones mutters. “We’ll have to get approval from the attorney general’s office first.”
“We can get it,” I say to him. “Tell someone who’s interested that I’ll owe them a favor. They want me, remember?”
He is quiet for a time. “Yeah. I guess that’s true.” He waves a hand, dismissing us. “Get out of here. I’ll go sell your soul for you.”
Tommy drives us home, as silent and inscrutable on the return as he was on the approach. I have no sense of him right now. Kirby seems untroubled but empathetic, content to keep quiet as long as the radio is on.
We pull into our driveway as the sun is coming up.
“Hop on out and turn over the keys,” Kirby says, fresh-scrubbed and bright, a blond and guiltless Pontius Pilate. “I’ll get rid of this vehicle and the guns and that’ll be that.” She winks. “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas right?”
Tommy sits on the edge of the bed, examining his hands. I sit next to him. His silence has become a solidity, something pervasive, like a wall of smoke or a bank of fog.
“Tommy,” I venture. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.” He continues to look at his hands. His voice sounds far away.
“Are we okay?” I ask.
His eyes focus on me now, but he seems confused, as if I just shook him awake.
“Of course we’re okay. We’re fine.”
“Then what’s wrong? You’re a quiet guy, but never for this long.”
He goes silent again. Watches the wall. “We almost killed a human being, Smoky,” he murmurs. “We hunted her down and we were prepared to execute her, to bury her body in the desert. That deserves some thought. That deserves my attention. Don’t get me wrong, I knew that’s what we were going to do. I played my part with both eyes open. But we almost took a life, cold-bloodedly. I would have done it too. You pulled us back from the brink, but I would have done it if you hadn’t. I don’t want to hold that under or push it aside or ignore it in any way. I want to feel it.”
I swallow my grief and my pain and my faint self-loathing.
“How does it feel?” I ask him.
He doesn’t answer right away. I watch him struggle. I observe evidence of sadness and strength, a mixture of love and loss, and, above these things, endurance. Tommy, I realize, is what my dad called “a laster.”
A laster, Dad told me, is someone who can endure everything without losing who they are. Like this woman I read about recently. She and her family were sent to the concentration camps in World War Two. She was twenty-five, married to her childhood sweetheart, had three children. She was the only one who made it out alive. She healed and went on to find new love and have another two sons. She died surrounded by her children and her grandchildren. A laster. Your mom is one.
What about you?
Me? No. I’m not a laster.
Dreamer though he was, Dad always judged himself honestly. I think that’s one of the reasons Mom let herself love him.
“It feels bad,” Tommy answers. He flexes his hands into fists, releases them. “But it’ll pass.”
I come into his arms, a sign of assent, but in my heart of hearts, that place where we’re always alone, I am less certain.
What does that make me?
Am I a laster?
We nap through the morning. It is a fitful sleep, filled with dreams I forget the minute I jolt awake. Just one image I am allowed to keep: my mother, silent. She watches me, not judging, not sad, warning me even as she understands.
Don’t forget the lighthouse, her eyes seem to say. Swim out too far and you’re too far out. Don’t forget, honey, because that ocean is always dark and always bottomless and when you sink, you sink forever.
I snuggle into my husband and search for whatever peace he can give me.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
“What was your father’s name?”
“Thomas Richard Lane. Corporal Thomas Richard Lane.”
Here we are again, I think. Back to the center of the circle.
I am sitting across from Mercy Lane in a cold, concrete interview room. We are alone. The walls soak up all the sound, and this gives me goose bumps, reminding me of the dark and the meadow behind my eyes.
But I hide my discomfort.
“Your father was in the army?”
“He fought in Korea.” She pauses, mulling something. “He was rea
lly made for it.”
“For what?”
“Surviving.”
I had reached out to Mercy with the offer of a standard interview, the kind I’d done for the BAU ten or more times before. She’d accepted, whether out of boredom or because she was, in the end, no different from all the rest of them, I don’t know.
It’s an opportunity to try to understand this person who almost turned me into a murderer. It’s also a chance to get the answers to some questions. There are some loose ends. They’ve been gnawing on the soft parts of me at night and interrupting my sleep.
“Why was survival so important to him?”
“Because survival is the only thing that is important. Everything else is a bonus, not a necessity.”
She’s impatient with my question, even a little hostile. I consider her reaction and change gears. “Fair enough,” I say, keeping my voice agreeable. “But your father seemed especially attuned to that truth. Why do you think he was able to recognize it so clearly?”
She relaxes. I’ve told her that her father was not just right but a visionary. This is comfortable ground for her. It doesn’t matter that he hacked off her breasts and twisted her spirit. She’s a cripple who thinks she can run.
“Various reasons. He grew up very poor, I know that. His mother was a prostitute and his father was a drunk who molested him. He had a younger sister and a younger brother. His mother died when he was still young, and then his father pimped out the children to keep himself in booze. It all prepared him for an understanding of the realities of life. He passed those understandings on to me.”
It’s a terrible story, but I find myself unmoved. I’ve heard of worse things happening to good men and women, people who didn’t grow up to abuse their children or become serial killers.
“That must have been difficult,” I allow.
She shrugs. “That’s life. Eat or be eaten.”
“How did they get through that?”
“Two of them didn’t. The sister killed herself. The brother was murdered by a john.”
“And your father?”
A glint of pride appears. “Once his brother died, he decided he’d had enough. He killed his father and buried him in the woods with the rest. Then he went into the army.”
“Why do you think he chose that path? The military, I mean.”
“Pragmatism. The army would house him and feed him and teach him how to kill skillfully. Also, the Korean War was happening.”
“Was that a major factor?”
She nods. “My father said that war is a bloody crucible. You go in human. You come out with death in your veins. You become stronger. He’d learned the necessity for strength.”
“Stronger why? Because you’ve lost your humanity?”
She looks into my eyes and I look behind hers. I try to see into the emptiness, but there’s nothing to see.
“Are you familiar with Buddhism?” she asks me. It’s a strange, abrupt question.
“Not very.”
“At its essence, Buddhism is based on the idea that the spirit is the only thing that’s true. Everything else that we see or feel”—she slaps her chest with her hands, indicates the hushed concrete walls that surround us—“all these material things are just illusion. Mara. According to Buddhism, as long as man believes that Mara, is what’s real, rather than the soul, he’s trapped. Doomed to the cycle of rebirth, life, and death, what they refer to as Samsara. Reincarnation.”
I say nothing, fascinated at this story of the soul from a monster’s mouth.
“But Buddha had it backward,” she continues. “Don’t you see? It’s not Mara that’s the illusion. It’s the soul.” She slams a fist down on the table. “This table is real. The pain I feel when I hit it too hard, that’s real. The soul?” She shakes her head. “Just a dream. Buddhism, Christianity, they all put you to sleep.” She leans forward, excited and grim. “War wakes you up.”
I stare at her, speechless. I can’t help it. She looks off, seeing something invisible to me.
“He loved it there, you know. In Korea. He told me a story one time about strangling a man in a rice paddy while the sun rose and the rain fell. That man died with water in his eyes and rice in his ears, hearing thunder. That’s what my father said.” She pauses. “All the lies are stripped away in war. All those illusions about beauty and ugliness, or goodness and badness, about any of them being important. In war, it’s meat against meat, to the death. The naked truth.” She sounds almost wistful. My stomach turns a little.
I gather myself and continue.
“What happened to your father?”
“He died of cancer.”
“Were you sad when he died?”
“I was regretful. He was my teacher. If he’d lived longer, I would have learned more.”
Nothing rises in her eyes at this. No hint of grief, no longing for the man who raised her. I try to picture him in my mind, but he is faceless, a burning man, branding his child as he’d been branded, scarring her deepest where it would never show.
It’s the same story I’ve heard before, too many times. Monsters who were made by monsters who go on to make monsters themselves. A chain stretching both forward and back into darkness.
Sometimes the link breaks, the light abides. Too many times it does not. I think about Hawaii, about the blackness between the stars, about how there will always be more darkness than points of light.
“What did you do with the women you kidnapped once you received payment from their husbands?”
“I killed them, of course.”
“And the bodies?”
“They were cut into pieces and the pieces were burned. The bone was ground to powder and everything was scattered.”
I sigh inside at this. Though it wasn’t entirely unexpected, I’d held out hope for reuniting at least some of the remains with their loved ones.
“How many victims did you take in total?”
She doesn’t have to think to come up with the number. “Forty-seven, including the women you would have found when you raided my other facilities.”
Forty-seven. It sounds like such a small number until you extrapolate it. Heather Hollister, forty-seven times. Avery and Dylan and Douglas again; all the world in a water drop.
I consider the number and something occurs to me.
“If you’d gotten up to forty-seven, why was I number 35?”
“Obfuscation. I didn’t number in sequence. If someone escaped, they wouldn’t be able to give an accurate count.”
“Very careful of you.”
She shrugs, dismissing the praise. “You can’t control all the factors in life necessary to guarantee survival, but failing to control every single one you can is simple incompetence.”
“I can see that.” I consult my notes. “The next set of questions has to do with some apparent inconsistencies in what you called your retirement plan. There are some actions that don’t add up, at least on the surface.”
“Go ahead,” she says, infinitely agreeable.
“First, broadly: How did you plan to ensure we’d find your Los Angeles location? I get the factors you put into play—Heather, the messages, kidnapping me—but none of those in and of itself was a guarantee. I’d assume you’d want a lock.”
She nods. “The plan was to continue to drop clues that would lead you to me—or Eric as me—and to do it in a believable fashion.”
“Believable how?”
“By laying the groundwork for the apparency of what you call decompensation.”
Decompensation means, literally, “the deterioration of a structure.” In the area of profiling serial offenders, it’s used to describe a pattern of devolvement. Many serial killers, even those who begin their careers as extremely organized individuals, eventually fall victim to their own underlying insanities. They start to deteriorate. To fall apart.
Words come to me:
I flipped a coin.
I’m not a cruel man.
Mercy said t
hese things to me when I was imprisoned in her custom gulag. They contradicted her profile at the time. They might make sense now.
“Forcing me to make that choice about Leo, trying to convince me you cared about seeming cruel—those were a part of it, weren’t they? They were supposed to make you look a little bit off.”
She smiles, but not in pleasure or cruelty; those emotions appear absent in her. “That’s correct. The messages and the deviation with Heather were a part of that framework as well. They were illogical changes to a formerly flawless methodology. My plan was to continue increasing evidence of my ‘aberrant behaviors’ until a huge and obvious mistake became a believable act. You’d assume I’d decompensated, and you wouldn’t question the incompetence that led you right to me.”
“That’s also why you left some victims behind for us to find, right? To show us that, as far as you were concerned, it was just business as usual and you were unaware you’d started losing your marbles?”
She shrugs. “As I’ve already said.”
I tap a pen on the notepad in front of me. “That’s all very elegant, Mercy, but it leaves a big question unanswered: Why go through any of it at all? No one even knew you existed. Why not just walk away?”
She gives me a tolerant, almost pitying look.
“What I said earlier applies: Failing to control all the factors you can control is simple incompetence. If I ‘walked away,’ as you put it, I would have left uncontrolled factors behind that might have become detrimental to me. No one knew I was there then, but that could have changed in the future. Someone like yourself might have seen a pattern, become suspicious, and started looking. It’s always possible I forgot something or made a mistake, however slight.” She shakes her head once in the negative. “Hope is not a viable scenario. Certainty is.”
I take all this in, almost as dumbfounded as I am enlightened.
What does this remind me of? Some computer phrase. Ah, right: garbage in, garbage out.
Mercy had locked herself into the necessity of calculating every possibility. In the end, it was that need to control all the variables that undid her. Pragmatic simplicity was defeated by an overabundance of complexity. Her brilliance became her psychosis.
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