by Steven James
* * *
She was concerned about my injured side, but I assured her I was alright. Admittedly, the stitched-up wounds did limit my mobility somewhat so the lovemaking was a bit constrained, but there are some things you can work around when you put your mind to it.
Afterward, Lien-hua lay beside me, snuggled up to my left side, her head resting lightly on my chest.
We lay there for a few minutes, a husband and his wife. One. For forever.
When she spoke, her voice was soft. “Pat, what haunts you the most?”
“What do you mean?”
She propped herself up on one elbow and gazed at me with those incisive ebony eyes. “I mean, the pain you’ve already seen or the pain you will see?”
I thought about it. I’d seen a lot of pain over the years. After all, evil is alive and well on our planet. I’d seen it flex its muscles and I would see that again. “The pain I won’t be able to stop,” I told her at last.
She let that sink in.
“What about you?”
“I suppose maybe it would be the pain I will see. The unknown is often more frightening than the known. When I consider some of the cases we’ve worked, as bad as they were, the future might be even worse.” She paused, perhaps thinking of something specific. “It’s hard, this thing that we do. I don’t think a lot of people would understand.”
“We end up carrying a lot.”
“We end up carrying more than we should.”
She lay down again and held me.
And I held her.
All I could think of was the phrase that had passed through my mind a minute ago about evil flexing its muscles.
It wasn’t long before my wife’s breathing became light and steady as sleep took over.
I had a feeling sleep would not come to me quickly tonight, however.
And when I closed my eyes, I found out I was right.
13
They say your dreams are the result of your subconscious sorting through the events of the day, processing what has happened, trying to make sense of it.
I’m not sure about that, but I think that typically people make a mistake when they try to read too much into dreams—but they make another when they discount them as meaningless.
Just like feelings, dreams are information about what’s going on deep inside you and because of that they can be useful, even though they might be difficult or even impossible to decipher.
For me, turmoil in my waking life usually meant turmoil in my dreams—which meant there was almost always at least a little turmoil in my dreams.
And now, tonight, harsh images invaded my dreams, tugging and ripping at them like razor wire snagged somehow in my thoughts, catching hold of the memories of the waking world, cutting into them, turning them against me.
In my dream I’m kneeling beside Stu Ritterman, trying to quell the bleeding coming from the stumps that used to be his legs.
It’s spurting and I can’t stop it. The tourniquets do no good.
Dreams might draw from reality, but they also twist it, morph it, and so now I see that his arms are gone too, lying on the concrete of the loading bay. Someone is screaming, and then Stu’s eyes are glazing over and it’s no longer him but Ralph who’s lying there before me. I’m trying to tell him that he’s fine, that he’s okay, and then Stu’s wife is there—Sherry is standing beside me.
Or Brineesha. It’s hard to tell.
It’s a dream.
The woman who’s standing there is screaming and holding her purse in front of her, but it’s been ripped open and its contents are spewing out.
Then she moves it aside and I see that it’s really her abdomen that’s ripped open.
A dream.
Ripped open.
Her intestines are unlooping, unfolding, and she’s still screaming, trying to push them back in, trying and failing.
Then I see for certain that it’s not Sherry but Brineesha—yes, Brineesha is standing there. The viscera become a baby, limp and dead, that falls from her stomach and drops heavily to the floor, with a moist and solid thud.
I hear a voice whispering from both above me and below me, four words over and over, a prayer: “Deliver us from evil . . . Deliver us from evil . . .”
A prayer.
That God is not answering.
No one is delivering me from evil. Instead it feels like I’m being drawn deeper and deeper into it.
There’s no place to hide. No place to run. And the petrifying dream has become the only thing I know here, deep in the folds of the night.
* * *
Columbia, South Carolina
The bard waited in Corrine Davis’s home. He had the ropes, the gag, the blade with him.
Standing beside the window in the deeply shadowed room, he watched as headlights swept across the front lawn and angled up the driveway toward the house.
The garage door rattled open.
In the light of the streetlamps, he recognized the car as it pulled up—a rust-colored Hyundai Veloster: Corrine arriving home. On Monday nights she typically worked late and then went out for drinks with her friends from the office. He knew that. He’d been studying her.
Forty minutes ago when he was driving to her neighborhood, the names of the deceased had been announced on the radio.
Patrick Bowers was still alive.
So.
Good.
There would be a sense of unity, of the past and the present meeting in the events that were going to unfold in the next five days.
Corrine pulled forward into the garage and the door slid shut behind her.
As the bard went upstairs toward her bedroom, he heard the door leading from the kitchen to the garage pop open, but it was dark on the stairway and the angle wasn’t right for her to see him from the kitchen.
He was safe.
He was out of her line of sight.
On the second level, he traversed the hallway, eased the bedroom door open, then slipped inside and returned the door to the position it’d been in so she wouldn’t be able to tell that someone was in her room, behind the door, waiting for her.
* * *
Last summer during his trial, the prosecution had said that he treated people like pieces of meat, that he would just as soon slit your throat as ask you how your day had been. No conscience, no regret, they had claimed, a complete lack of empathy for others.
Then the media had latched onto the fact that he showed no reaction when the names of his victims were read in court. Which, as it turned out, had taken a while.
After the trial, while the bard was in solitary confinement, he’d had plenty of time to think about what the prosecution had said and, in a very real sense, he found himself agreeing with them.
No conscience. No regret. A complete lack of empathy for others.
In truth, they were right: He didn’t know what it was like to care, to love, to become emotionally attached to something or someone. He had never known intimacy, never felt loved or unloved, never understood what people meant when they said their feelings were hurt.
The bard didn’t take pleasure in seeing people suffer. He didn’t take pleasure in anything, not really. He couldn’t recall a time when he’d felt happy, felt joy, felt a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.
Not one time, not ever.
It wasn’t like that for him.
“Pleasure” was not a word that had entered his heart’s vocabulary.
He was attracted to women and used them to fulfill certain needs, yes, but his feelings toward them didn’t extend to anything beyond that.
In order to successfully navigate his way into a marriage, he had faked love for his wife. Additionally, he had treated his work associates with enough fabricated compassion to become successful in his career, but it had
all been an artifice he’d constructed to function in a world full of people who looked with suspicion on those who had no concern for the welfare of others.
True love, if it existed anywhere, was not something the bard had ever known.
It didn’t make him feel incomplete. He didn’t miss it. Didn’t have any sense of longing for it.
When he told his stories, it wasn’t for pleasure; it was for posterity. His victims were simply characters in the tale, nothing more. Nothing less. And sometimes the players in the tales he was telling had to suffer.
Just as it is with every story worth telling.
So, yes, the prosecution had been right. He would just as soon slit your throat as ask you how your day had been. That much they’d gotten exactly correct.
In the faint light that made its way through the shaded bedroom window, he could see the orientation of the mirror on the vanity to where he stood and he noted that he wouldn’t be visible to Corrine until she was standing directly in front of the mirror.
As the bard thought of her, he looked at the wedding ring he was wearing and recalled his wife, how she had divorced him during the trial. In most prisons they let you keep your wedding rings as long as they’re simple bands and not costly, and that’d been the case in the facility where he’d been incarcerated. So why did he still wear his? A reminder of his old life? He wasn’t sure. He was—
A slight creak told him that Corrine was on the stairs.
Then footsteps padding down the hall.
He waited.
As they came closer he could hear her talking, obviously on the phone.
She pressed open the bedroom door and the bard flattened his back against the wall behind it. As she swept past him, just a few feet away, he caught the scent of her perfume, light and airy and touched with the fragrance of sweet, sweet flowers.
She flicked on the bedroom light.
Leaning slightly to the side, the bard peered out from behind the door and looked at her. Late thirties. Light blond hair. Medium height. A slim figure.
Attractive.
Yes.
He found her attractive.
Corrine didn’t see him, remained completely unaware that someone else was in the room with her as she spoke on her cell: “Uh-huh, I know. I heard. I’m so glad we landed the account, anyway . . .”
Her back was to him.
“So, yeah, I’m flying to Miami in the morning. No. As far as I know it’s just me . . .”
Having her on the phone was not ideal. If he made a move now, while she was talking to someone, she might cry out and they might hear her.
It would be best if he waited for her to get off the line.
She kicked off her shoes, then loosened her hair and shook it free.
Yes, attractive.
“That would be so sweet of you,” she said into the phone. “Oh, and did you hear about Ellie and Matthew? I know. Can you believe it? Twelve years and then . . . Yeah, no kidding . . .”
He waited for her to hang up.
Fortuitously, he didn’t have to wait long.
She approached the mirror and reached up to take out one of her earrings. “Well, I gotta go. See you when I get back. Right. Bye.”
The bard slowly swung the door away from himself until it was nearly closed again.
She was lowering the phone to set it down when she caught sight of him watching her in the mirror.
Startled, she gasped and spun to face him. “Who are you?” Instinctively she drew her hands up in front of her. A small way of hiding. The bard had seen it before. Right now there was more shock than terror.
But the terror would come.
“Corrine. I know your brother. I thought it was time we met.”
He tossed the ropes onto the bed and, just as she began to scream, he was on her, clamping his hand over her mouth and dragging her toward the nearest bedpost.
No conscience. No regret. A complete lack of empathy for others.
Yes.
He would just as soon slit your throat as ask you how your day had been.
Yes.
True enough.
He found her attractive and he had all night ahead of him.
Let’s see where things go from here.
PART II
Mortalis
14
Tuesday, July 30
7:01 a.m.
I’m not sure how long I lay in bed, lingering between the dream world and the real one, but when I finally did stir from my sleep, sunlight was streaming through our bedroom window.
I did my best to let the troubling images that had plagued me through the night slip away, but they lingered and it seemed as if the harder I tried to make myself forget them, the more they burrowed into my memory.
Once again I saw the dying man, the dead child. Heard the screams. Felt the terrible, wrenching heartache.
Yes, I knew none of it was real, but that didn’t offer me much comfort because less than twenty-four hours ago five people I knew were alive, and now they were dead even though no one had actually died—not for real—in my dreams.
Reality is the greater nightmare, the one you can’t just wake up from and forget.
I checked the time and realized I would need to be leaving within the next half hour if I was going to make it through DC’s rush-hour traffic to the J. Edgar Hoover Building in time for the nine o’clock meeting.
As I sat up in bed the stitches tugged at my side, hurting more sharply than they had last night.
I eased onto my back again.
I’d left the bandages on to keep blood off the sheets, but now when I checked, I found that some of the dressings were stained dark from seepage during the night.
And the sheets hadn’t escaped unscathed either.
I heard Lien-hua in the bathroom attached to our bedroom.
“Morning,” I called.
She poked her head through the door. “Hey, you. How are you feeling?” She was brushing her hair. Rich. Black. Damp from a shower. I hadn’t even noticed her slipping out of bed, and now I wondered how long she’d been up.
“Honestly,” I said, “I’ve had days when I felt more ready to take on the world.”
She came into the room wearing a black bra and panties.
Seeing her in that, I wished we didn’t need to take off this morning and could spend a little time reenacting last night’s rendezvous.
After wiggling into a pair of pants, she said, “You didn’t sleep much last night.”
“I’m sorry if I kept you up.”
“No need to be sorry.” She held up a shirt, studied herself in the mirror, then chose a different one—silky and shimmering blue—and slipped it on. “So, was it more your dreams or those stitches?” She was well aware of how my cases often wouldn’t leave me alone, even when I slept, so her question didn’t surprise me.
“Dreams.”
“Do you want to talk about them?”
“I’d rather do my best to forget ’em.”
“Fair enough.”
“I should get moving.” Careful to keep from twisting too much, I stood. “So, what’s your plan for this morning?”
“We’re meeting at the Academy—the profilers are. Call me when you’re out of your briefing with Margaret. I want to hear how it goes. And don’t tussle with her.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Just call me Mr. Tact.”
“Well, then, come here, Mr. Tact.” She drew me close, gave me a kiss. “I gotta go. I love you.”
“You too.”
Moments later she was on her way.
Realizing the obvious—that we were both going to be gone this morning, I made a call to put something into play, then I cleaned up, replaced the bandages, and tugged on so
me clothes.
Normally when Tessa doesn’t have school, she’ll sleep in until around noon, so I didn’t expect her to be up yet, but I found her sitting at the kitchen table, finishing a bowl of organic granola in soy milk and a plate of chocolate cake—her one vegan vice, since it’s made with animal products. Yes, there were plenty of vegan cake options out there, but she’d just never warmed up to any of them.
A cup of steaming coffee sat beside her elbow.
“There’s more in the pot.” She yawned and I caught it from her, yawned myself.
I filled a mug. “Thanks.”
“I’m not going to ask you about your side because you’ll just tell me it’s fine no matter how much it’s hurting. But let me ask you this . . .”
“Yes?”
“You have the choice: either a leech sucking on your eyeball or your side all stitched up like this, what would you choose?”
“Seriously? A leech sucking on my eyeball?”
“It just came to me.”
“I’d have to say my side.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Definitely.”
“Well, then, that’s good to hear.” She sighed. “So, basically, I got zero sleep last night. There was . . .”
She yawned again.
So did I.
“Did you ever wonder why yawns are contagious?” I asked, somewhat hypothetically.
“No one really knows,” she muttered. “Emotional bonding maybe, social empathy, but that’s all conjecture. Kids younger than four don’t typically catch yawns. Autistic people usually don’t either. Dogs can catch yawns from people—more often from their owners than from strangers. So that’s pretty weird. And disgusting. The last thing I’d want is for a dog to yawn in my face.”
My daughter: Passionate animal lover. Ardent dog hater.
“That’s very informative,” I told her.
“What can I say? I’m a wellspring of useless trivia. Anyway, I didn’t hardly sleep at all. You know. A lot on my mind.”
“I know the feeling. Is there anything I can do for you?”
She shook her head. “Naw.”
I glanced at the time. “Listen, I have a meeting at HQ. I’m not sure when I’ll be back.”