Portrait of the Psychopath as a Young Woman - Edward Lee.wps

by phuc

  "Isn't it against the law for the police to tap somebody's phone without their permission?"

  "Under ordinary circumstances, of course. But under exceptional circumstances? Such as these?

  We don't need permission when such a surveillance is deemed by a judge to be relevant. When a citizen's life is in reasonable danger. And when such a surveillance would provide a positive utility regarding the active investigation of a grievous crime. Check Section XI, paragraph 2a of the District Annotated Code: Telephone Surveillance and Protocol Pursuant to Investigative Operations of Major Crimes."

  "This isn't China, Spence. I shouldn't have to worry about your big ears in my apartment every time I pick up the phone."

  "And as I've striven to remind you, quite often, our surveillance is also for your protection."

  Striven? she wondered. "Uh huh. And I'll bet you own the deed to the Empire State Building."

  Spence set his chin in his palm. "Are you going to answer my initial question? You always evade questions that you don't want to answer."

  "Yes," Kathleen stonily stated. "This was the first time the killer has called me."

  "But you'd like her to call again, as frequently as possible. Wouldn't you? For the book?"

  "Yeah. And maybe if she calls enough times, you nimrods will be able to catch her."

  Spence had explained last night's debacle, the traces, the DF, the helicopter ride for nothing.

  Could the killer really be that much smarter than Spence and all his technology? Someone must have faith in the man, to put all those resources, all those men and all that equipment, at his instant disposal. But if I was the police chief, Kathleen fantasized, Spence would be cleaning the toilets.

  "Jonathan Duff, Arlington, Virginia," Spence noted to her. "He had phony plates on his car. I wonder why... Anyway, he's the seventh victim, at least that we're aware of. She's maintaining a formidable accretion of bodies."

  Yes, she was. And Kathleen knew that the account of this latest victim would be in her mail soon. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps today.

  "Let's listen some more," Spence said. "Shall we?" He pressed the PLAY button:

  "You are a great woman," the voice drew on, "to be what you are, to rise above. Like me. We are both great women. You'll see."

  "I don't know what you mean," Kathleen said on the tape. In the background, the car engine could be heard, and every so often, a dismal moan.

  "You'll see," the voice repeated. It paused perhaps she was turning. Then: "There it is! I can see it!"

  "What? What can you see?"

  "The Cross. It's... I can see it. It's beautiful."

  "You're religious?" Kathleen asked.

  "No."

  "Tell me about The Cross."

  "No. We all have our crosses. I do. You do... Sometimes, I can look at a man's face and see his bones. I can see his blood in him. My mother shows me their blood."

  "Tell me about your mother."

  "She..."

  "Did you love her?"

  "She tells me things. She tells me how to be honest, and smart."

  "But your mother's dead. You said so in the first manuscript."

  "She's not dead. She'll never be dead, not really. Don't you know what I mean? Like, when you really love somebody?"

  Kathleen remembered the pause which followed. She remembered trying to think of some tactic to keep the killer on the line, some way to feign a bond. How complex was the killer intellectually? Would she see through such a ploy? "I'd like to be your friend," Kathleen said.

  "We should be friends, we should meet."

  "Now you're lying. If I agreed to meet with you, you'd lead the police right to me."

  "No, I wouldn't," Kathleen bumbled back. "You should trust me we should trust each other."

  "Why?"

  "Because then we'll be stronger. Against them."

  Another static hesitation. Was it working?

  "Against who?"

  "All the men out there who would hurt us," Kathleen answered. "There're lots of them. They're all over, everywhere. We have to be careful."

  "So...well..." The voice receded again to the faint, grainy drone of the car's engine. "Then I guess I should tell you where I live, or some place to meet me."

  She's testing you, Kathleen had realized. "No," she said, "don't do that! The police are probably bugging my phone."

  Spence paused the tape player again. "I'm impressed by your intuition," he told her. "At least I think I am. You knew that the killer was baiting your motives."

  "Of course," Kathleen replied. As always, the sun glared in her eyes from the window behind Spence, to deform her frown. "The only way I can gain her trust is to act as though her delusion is real. Otherwise she'd never believe a conspiracy proposal. If I'd asked her where she lives, she'd have hung up."

  "Good," Spence approved. "Very good." He turned the deck back on and slightly increased the volume.

  "But if the police are bugging your phone, then they just heard you say that," the killer's strangely gentle voice continued. "What would they say? What would this... Mr. Spence...say about that?"

  This had surprised Kathleen. How did the killer know Spence was involved with the case? "To hell with the police," Kathleen answered, "especially that asshole Spence. They can't touch me. I can do whatever I want, I can talk to anyone I feel like talking to. It's a free country."

  She hoped that the pauses after each of her statements meant that the killer was thinking, making considerations of trust; Kathleen needed her to believe she was on her side. This time, though, the killer responded: "The Cross is like a big star that takes the pain away. That's why I look at it.

  Everybody has a cross to take the pain away we all have pain I can see The Cross even when my eyes are closed I glue their eyes closed taking away the pain is what I'm talking about Mother I know don't be upset I take the pain and give it to someone else I put it somewhere else all the pain that Daddy made my mother feel all the things he did to her when he came over he always made me watch he'd fuck me while he made me watch people do things to my mother but now I know how to take away the pain you should have seen the way this one lurched when I cut it off sometimes they pass out from the pain so I wait 'til they wake up I sew their lips shut so they can't make noise and I think about The Cross while I'm working on them and it puts the pain into them it takes it out of me it takes it out of my mother and puts it into them it's our power, did you know that? No I guess you don't know that yet."

  Kathleen's own voice turned dark with the question. "What? What's our power?"

  "Pain."

  In the next pause, a car horn honked. She seemed to be making a turn, and muttering something inaudible. "It's time for me to go," she said next. "I'll be in touch. You're almost ready."

  "Ready for what?" Kathleen asked.

  "But first you need to be purged."

  "What?"

  "You're still corrupted."

  "In what way?"

  "I will show you away from your corruption," the killer avowed. "I will purge you."

  Next came abrupt, nondescript sounds. Thunking. Mumbling. A long, low moan distinctly male.

  "Don't hang up!" Kathleen pleaded. "Are you there? Are you still there?" She made this plea for many minutes more, until she heard the sirens, the helicopters...

  Spence punched off the tape. "She's very calculating," he suggested. "She deliberately didn't hang up, even when she left the vehicle. She had a good idea that we were trying to trace the call and DF the mobile phone signal. She was toying with us."

  "Where did she disappear to?" Kathleen wondered.

  "No doubt she'd previously parked her car somewhere nearby, probably in one of the alleys off the main road, or somewhere in the industrial site. She drove away five minutes before our units arrived."

  Kathleen felt uncomfortable in the hot seat, the sun in her face. "How did she know about you?"

  "‘Rome, the pimp. I'd talked to him the day before we found his body.
"

  "And what was all that stuff... Most of the conversation she sounded very clear headed, coherent.

  Then she goes into the bit about the pain, taking her mother's pain away, and all that."

  "Psychiatrists call it word salad," Spence enlightened her. "A fairly common trait in bipolar psychosis. One minute she acts and sounds normal, the next minute she's completely dissociated, completely submerged in her delusions, to such an extreme extent that only she can understand herself."

  "Like split personality?"

  "No, no, nothing like that. It's a conversion of mental dispositions, an exchange from the reality state to the delusory state. That's why we're having such a hard time catching her. In the reality mode she's very sharp, even rational. She's able to keep control over the delusion." Spence took the cassette out of the tape player, appraising it with his gaze. "But it's...chilling, isn't it?"

  Kathleen fumbled with an unlit cigarette. "What do you mean?"

  "The voice, or I should say the idea. The idea that the voice we just heard belongs to a woman who's tortured and murdered at least seven men."

  Chilling? Kathleen thought. Suddenly she was famished, like she could eat a whole box of sugary cereal, or an entire pizza. She could eat a whole jar of peanut butter 'til it lodged in her throat. "I wouldn't say chilling as much as alien. Like something inhuman speaking in the voice of a beautiful woman. I wonder what she looks like. I wonder if she's beautiful."

  "More than likely, she's very beautiful," Spence said. Today he wore an unusually wide, striped tie, but it looked crumpled. "Serial killers frequently take the specific element by which they were abused as children and turn it against the people they perceive to be their enemies. Her father sexually abused her, her father was a man, so now she's utilizing her sexuality to put her in a clandestine position of power over men. Every man she kills, to her, is her father."

  Daddy, Kathleen thought.

  Spence pushed back his rather unkempt hair. "But I wonder what she meant when she said that you were corrupted, and that she would purge you of your corruptions?"

  "I wish I knew."

  "It's a little scary, isn't it?"

  "No," Kathleen said. Somehow, it wasn't scary at all. Again, she thought it more alien than anything else.

  "Well, whatever she means, we can use it to our advantage. She's beginning to trust you. She's beginning to believe that you desire to be in league with her, for the sake of her ‘story.' It's important that you do everything you can to make her continue to believe that. Keep acting as though the police are not only her enemies, but yours too. Moreover and obviously she hates men. If she believes that you, too, hate men, then eventually she'll trust you enough to arrange a meeting, or perhaps to make an unscheduled visit."

  More games, Kathleen thought. Spence had actually been tolerable today, until now. Trying to scare me. Trying to rattle my cage, she thought. Next, he'll probably mention Uncle Sammy.

  "Not to change the subject," Spence went on, "but I just want you to know that we're still trying to locate your uncle."

  "For my protection, right?"

  "Yes."

  "And because any outside interference from my uncle could botch your investigation, destabilize your human bait, right?"

  "In a sense, yes."

  "Thank you at least for not lying to me, like you usually do. We get along much better when you don't lie to me. I might even like you some day."

  "Implausible. And it's even more implausible that I would ever like you," Spence said, back to his stone cold face. "Condescending, reactionary, unrealistic, feminist "

  "You really are a prick "

  Spence offered a dismayed look. "You just got done saying that you want me to be honest."

  " a humorless, unfriendly, unmitigated prick."

  "And as I said before, the more she trusts you, the greater the chance that she'll make an effort to meet you. I can't imagine why, but to her you're a ‘Great Woman.' You represent something that she absolutely envies. Which leads me to my next point."

  Kathleen lit her cigarette, dragged deep, and spewed smoke toward Spence.

  "Regarding a certain unregistered, illegal handgun that your boyfriend gave you? Which, in addition, I've been lenient enough not to prosecute you for possessing?"

  "What about it, Spence?"

  He gave her the oddest look, as if making a consideration against some nameless physical strain.

  "Keep it close at hand," he advised. "And keep it loaded."

  | |

  Chapter 27

  (I)

  Maxwell felt dissipated, like he'd done 12 hours of road work. It was a joyous exhaustion, though. Writing, even to the point of physical stupor, always left him radiant. In joy.

  He stood now on his balcony. Mid-afternoon nailed the city down with planks of heat. Below, traffic jerked up and down P Street. All he need do, at any given moment, was glance at the city's slog of traffic to be grateful he didn't own a car.

  He didn't need a car. All he needed was his muse, his fingers, and his typewriter.

  And Kathleen, he thought. The missing piece of my life.

  But, no, she wasn't a piece. She was an entity. She was a beautiful, wonderful woman whom he loved. That must be it, he postulated. So unadorned, so simple. Isn't that what everything is all about, from the beginning to the very end of the world? Love? It sounded so blatantly idealistic, but he knew it was true. It was the meaning of life. It was the meaning of Everything...

  Okay. Great. But does she love me? She'd said she did, but didn't people often say things they didn't mean? Wasn't human love, in all its import, partly or even fully impossible to define?

  Did Kathleen even know what love was?

  But these questions were futile. I can't spend the rest of my life weighing questions, Maxwell substantiated. I have to live my life based on the things that I KNOW about myself.

  This made much more sense. He knew that he loved her. Therefore, he must proceed from there.

  Maxwell was not a traditionalist, but he'd learned, in his own experiences, that most women were, even when they said they weren't. He'd never, for instance, sent a woman flowers. He'd send poetry instead, because poetry was eternal. Weren't eternal symbols far more meaningful? A dozen long stemmed roses were withered and ugly in days, and in the garbage, but a poem never lost its petals, a poem never wilted and died. Wasn't it a better display of love to give a piece of himself than something he could buy in a store? Of course it is, his poet's psyche agreed. But, still, there always came times when traditionalism must be acknowledged.

  I'll have to buy her an engagement ring, he thought. He'd never done that before; he didn't even know how to make such a purchase. He knew they cost thousands of dollars, though, so at least he knew something. What was the procedure? Should he buy the ring on his own, and give it to her when he proposed? Or should he propose first, and then let her pick out her own ring? I don't even know her ring size, he thought. And then he thought: I don't even know if she'll say yes...

  That didn't matter, though. Follow your heart, he thought. In these times, in truth, what else was there to follow? Social trends? Politics? Material? No, none of that was real. There was only love.

  Am I being unrealistic? he wondered. Am I rushing things? And what of the timing? Was this the optimum time to make his proposal? Haunted afresh now by the memory of her uncle's sexual abuse? Bulldogged and spied upon by police? Harassed by a psychotic killer? No, by all intents, it probably wasn't the optimum time, but that didn't matter, either. What he felt in his heart could only be made true by his own concurrence of self. Time was always now.

  The moment...is now. And if it isn't now, then it's false. It's ashes. It's dust.

  It's settled, he concluded. His long hair wavered in his eyes as he gazed off the high balcony.

  Today I'll price engagement rings.

  The poem was done. He'd written it dozens of times in the past two days. He'd honed it, crafting and
recrafting, structuring and restructuring. He'd spent an hour deliberating over the placement of a comma, and another hour removing it. There came a point in the revision process when the work could be embellished no further. Minutes ago, Maxwell had reached that point. The poem was as good as he'd ever be able to make it. The poem was done.

  He remained gazing off the balcony a while longer, to clear his brain of the wringing muse. Then he went back in. The platen pawl clicked when he rolled the poem from the typewriter. He read it a final time, then nodded.