Psycho Save Us

by Huskins, Chad

  RUN! she sent to her sister. RUN! DON’T LOOK BACK! JUST GO!

  The nameless other girl squealed and dropped stupidly to the ground, looking at Shannon’s retreating little body with a mixture of hope and dread.

  Kaley wrestled with the big man, who finally grabbed her by the throat, hauled her off the ground and slammed the back of her head on the pavement. The wind was knocked out of her, and she almost swallowed the bundled cloth in her mouth. She twisted her head around so that she could see Shannon get away from—

  There was a gunshot. It was deafening. Shannon dropped face first on the pavement, and for a second Kaley screamed through her gag and almost choked on the cloth again. She knew her sister had been shot. She knew it. The little body lay there, motionless. Kaley hadn’t felt Little Sister’s death as she had Nan’s, and didn’t feel the still-dying sensation as she had from those thugs back in that house of death, but her mind told her the truth.

  Shannon, her gorgeous, most valuable possession, was dead. Kaley’s life was over. Without Little Sister, there was no life. Such a simple yet elegant truth, it could never be denied, because Mom was no kind of mom at all. Ricky was gone. These men were going to take her places, make her do things…and without Little Sister—

  It’s a mercy, she told herself. Better off dead than with these monsters.

  Then, her eyes showed her something that her charm already knew. Shannon moved. She wasn’t dead. Kaley looked over to her right. The jaundiced man was standing there, pistol in hand, aimed at the air. The barrel was smoking. He had fired a warning shot at Shan. “Come back now, little girl!” he cried, and aimed the gun down at Kaley. “Or I kill sister!”

  “It doesn’t matter!” Kaley tried to scream. “Run, Shannon! Run! Don’t worry about me! Just run!” But nothing more than garbled screams came out, and poor Shan probably thought they were screams of fear. Little Sister perceived wrongly. She thought Big Sister was terrified for her own life.

  Kaley’s heart sank when she saw Shannon stand, turn, and take her first step back towards them, almost as bad as it had sank when she thought Little Sister was dead. Oni ran across the yard, looking left and right, probably concerned with who might’ve heard the shot. He snatched Shannon up by her arms and flung her over his shoulder.

  Someone shouted from somewhere behind Kaley. It was a woman. “Vsyo v poryadke?”

  “Da!” Oni shouted. He pointed to the jaundiced man and the driver, and then pointed to Kaley and the nameless girl. He gave a quick series of commands that Kaley couldn’t follow. Shannon was handed off to the woman who came around the side of the SUV. The woman was tall and pale, with long, curly black hair with oily bangs hanging in her eyes. She wore an American Idol T-shirt and tattered jeans. For just a moment, seeing Shan handed off to a female gave Kaley hope. But then she saw the supreme look of disgust on this woman’s face, and hope faded for the dozenth time this night. Not a safe female. Not a good one.

  “Prostite chto vas pobespokoil, Olga,” said Oni.

  Kaley had heard that name said a few times now—at least, she thought it was a name, it was said with a kind emphasis, almost barked—and so she started to think of this woman as Olga. Who are you, Olga? Kaley wondered as the jaundiced man jerked her up by the arm. What are you doing with us? What are you going to do to my sister?

  They started the march inside the house. Kaley walked in between all the men, utterly surrounded. Olga, with Shan in her arms, had taken the lead. At the porch, Shan looked up with tearful eyes. She blinked hopelessly, not knowing what she should do, if she should do anything. Kaley tried to send out waves of reassurance, but again, she had to feel it herself if she meant for it to feel genuine at all.

  Behind her, the other little girl whimpered. Kaley glanced back, and saw that the jaundiced man was walking right in behind her. He had raised up the back of her skirt with one hand and was pinching her butt with his other. Kaley saw the nauseating fear on the girl’s face, and for a moment was infected with it herself. The nameless girl wasn’t just scared as Kaley was scared, she was near paralyzed.

  The screen door creaked open and they stepped inside what would become a true house of horrors that night.

  For everyone involved.

  The first ambulance to arrive at 12 Townsley Drive had just now sedated Officer Beatrice Fanney. Leon had arrived in a squad car driven by an old beat cop friend of his named Edmond Rosario. He’d radioed dispatch for a lift once he realized his car was stolen. It had pissed him off to no end, but confusion had replaced anger when Edmond had gotten the call from dispatch, saying, “Uh, Officer Rosario, have you Detective Leon Hulsey in the car with you?” When Edmond had confirmed that he did indeed, the dispatch lady had said, “Then you can tell him we found his car. It’s at Townsley Drive.”

  Leon now stood staring at his car. It didn’t make any sense at first. None at all. The flashing red-and-blue lights from all the cop cars now present splashed against his Nissan as he went through it all. He found nothing missing. Nothing at all. It wasn’t until bodies were being pulled out from the house and the ambulance was speeding Officer Fanney away from the scene that he finally stepped out and said the obvious to himself. “Son of a bitch stole my car.”

  Special Agent Porter was standing on the porch talking with his fellow agents, who then stepped inside the house. The three of them had arrived way ahead of Leon because he’d been carless. Now Porter walked silently over to him and said, “Seven dead altogether. Fucker who did it was a decent shooter, too. He was firing pretty tight groups. At least he did on the thugs. He fired willy-nilly with a shotgun at the officers.”

  Leon nodded. He put both hands on the roof of his car and fumed for a moment.

  “Find anything missing? Any guns or extra ammo you keep—?”

  “No, nothing missing,” Leon said. A fire truck honked behind him for one of the patrol cars to get out of its way. “Didn’t take my comics or my newspaper. Far as I can tell, nothing’s wrong except damage to the ignition cover and the wiring.” He took in a deep breath, and fought screaming. Then, he lashed out and kicked the door, denting it significantly. Agent Porter just watched him. “Motherfucker stole my car. Had to be a coincidence. But what are the fucking odds?”

  “Maybe it was coincidence,” Porter said, shrugging.

  Leon pushed himself away from his car. “But you don’t think so.”

  Again, Porter shrugged.

  “Tell me. What’s going on here tonight?”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary for this individual,” Porter said.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to try better than that, Agent Porter,” Leon said, taking a step towards the other man. Leon knew he was a big man, and had always noticed how people moved out of his way whenever he walked, well, anywhere. Hallways, restaurants, sidewalks, anywhere. But Agent Porter had obviously seen a lot in his time, had been intimidated by some of the best, and worst, pieces of shit that the street could regurgitate. He didn’t back away even a noticeable millimeter when Leon loomed over him. “Beatrice Fanney is a damn good cop. Always backs up her partners without flinching. All the women and men at APD respect her. David Emerson is my friend. A good cop. Cares more than most would about the assholes in the Bluff. So I’m pissed off. But there’s also seven bodies to account for, all murdered. Who the fuck is this guy? I’m not gonna ask you again.”

  “Con man, escape artist, psychopath. That’s all I can—”

  “Details.”

  At first, Agent Porter appeared reluctant. He looked over his shoulder, perhaps to make certain that his fellow agents were adequately busy for the moment. He touched Leon’s elbow, a gesture that no one had done since his mother when he’d been in trouble, and started to guide him away from the hubbub. Hennessey and his SWAT team were now on the scene and were moving through the nearby woods with search dogs. Townsley Drive, a bleak zone of forgotten prospects before tonight, now had life churning through it again.

  “I don’t see any rea
son why I can’t shed a little light on some of the details,” Agent Porter said. “But there are parts that…well, aren’t something we want as public record. I’ll tell you which parts those are and why we don’t want them known yet.”

  Leon nodded. This was a start, at least.

  “Spencer Adam Pelletier killed his first victim when he was thirteen years old,” Porter said. “He attacked and killed a kid named Miles Hoover after he had said something to some other kid named Roberto Castillo. Castillo was new to the country, fresh over from Mexico, and Hoover thought it was funny to mock his thick Spanish accent. Now, there is absolutely no indication that Pelletier and Castillo were ever friends, but one day, in science class, Pelletier told Hoover to lay off Castillo. Hoover was a pretty big kid, but Pelletier had been held back a bit in school even though he’d shown to be very smart in previous grades, so he was as big as Hoover. But Hoover didn’t take his threat seriously. He laughed at Pelletier and started calling him a fag and shit like that. Then one day, Pelletier attacked Hoover in the school library.

  “Now, Pelletier didn’t just attack this kid. He moved in a way that showed careful preplanning and finesse. See, once a week, second period classes were required to take the kids to the library to get a new book. To promote reading, right? Well, according to other students, Pelletier had noticed that Hoover always asked to go to the bathroom right as the class was returning from the library. Pelletier had checked out a book a week previously, and neglected to exchange it. We believe it was intentional neglect, because he used it as an excuse to return to the library very quickly, alone, to drop the book back in the return box, sparing him a late fine.

  “Pelletier had a plastic zip tie in his pocket when he left the classroom. He timed it so that Hoover would be on his way to the bathroom—Hoover was one o’ these kids who always tried to get outta class all the time, for any reason, for any amount of time he could finagle. Always asking to go to the bathroom when he really didn’t need to, complaining he was sick, shit like that. Pelletier knew that Hoover would cut through the library on his way back from the bathroom, like most kids did.

  “There wasn’t anybody in the library at the time. It was closed during those hours, but the door was almost always left unlocked. Again, something Pelletier knew. All the kids knew it. He was counting on it. And when Hoover dipped into the dark library, we can imagine Pelletier probably stepped out from behind a bookshelf or a desk, and then put the zip tie around Hoover’s neck and squeezed it tight before Hoover could put up much of a fight. Hoover suffocated to death while Pelletier watched. Pelletier used a pair of scissors from the librarian’s desk to cut the zip tie off and then returned to his classroom.

  “Miles Hoover’s death was determined a murder right away—the ligature marks, right?—and after a few weeks’ worth of investigation a detective got it out of a few kids that Hoover and Pelletier had been upset with one another, and Pelletier had been gone at that exact time of death. When asked what he’d done, Pelletier didn’t deny it. In fact, he laughed. According to the reports, he laughed until tears came out of his eyes and he couldn’t catch his breath.”

  Leon and Agent Porter had been walking very slowly away from the crime scene, over to the rundown home on the opposite side of the street. The large detective pulled to a stop, nodding thoughtfully. “They try him as an adult?”

  “Nope,” said Porter, smiling strangely. “See, Pelletier was a psychopath before very many people really understood that psychopaths are born, not grown. They can’t be changed, can’t be made to empathize with anyone—they have absolutely no empathy. And since a person can’t just grow a conscience, there was no hope for him. Not ever. But, people didn’t know it back then, and even today many counselors and shrinks are reluctant to curse a kid for life by branding him or her a psychopath. They wanna believe all kids can get help.

  “Pelletier was able to convince people that it was all innocent, that he was just playing a game with Hoover, that they were even doing ‘something gay together’ as he put it. Erotic asphyxiation, shit like that. It had just gone too far, that’s all. And since he’d been held back in school, he was able to play like he was partially touched in the head. Confused the courts bad enough that he was first placed into a wilderness therapy program in Utah—that’s, you know, where they take kids out in the middle o’ the woods and try to analyze them while reconnecting them with nature, gets them away from drugs, or their lives as prostitutes, all that shit—and then from there he went to a boarding school.

  “Pelletier fucked up in boarding school, too. Stabbed an instructor in the cheek with a pencil. Then he was sent to a youth reformatory in Roarke, Colorado, which he stayed at until he was eighteen. It was his last chance, and he did incredibly well there. Of course this was long, long before people fully understood that psychopaths are incredible liars and manipulators—there’s evidence that, while at the reformatory, he got a few of the guards upset at one another, convinced one of them that another guard was lying about some money borrowed, or some such. Just like a psychopath to spread discord, pit one friend against another.

  “So, he got out of the reformatory a model inmate-patient,” Porter went on. “It’s not entirely clear what happened next—the file on his life at the bureau has been mostly pieced together by me since I took this case—but it seemed he hooked up at some point with an old friend of his from school named Hoyt Graeber. Now, Graeber was just one o’ these kids who got involved slinging dope early, a jab here, a jab there, and eventually developed enough skill at it that he got recognized by Rico Nashton. Heard of him?”

  Leon squinted, thinking. “Sounds familiar.”

  “Nashton was one of the guys who—”

  “Oh, right! The Gold Club.” The Gold Club was a strip joint in Atlanta that received national attention back in 2001 for the indictments of several of the owners, managers and employees. The place had been shut down for a while now, but another place called the Gold Room had opened in its place. “Nashton was caught moving drugs through some of the strippers there, right?”

  “That’s right,” Porter said. “Pelletier and his friend Graeber were involved with Nashton’s operation for a number of years, just long enough for Pelletier to pick up a few tricks. First he started driving cars full of heroin across from Mexico into the States, and through these interactions he met the kind of individuals who could teach the fundamentals and advanced techniques of the criminal lifestyle—useful info like robbing a bank on Fridays because that’s when they got their money, to using knock-off capecitabine, which is a chemotherapeutic pillthat makes your hands peel and makes it so that you never leave any fingerprints.

  “In 2001 Nashton takes a hit, gets sent to the pen for a dime, and the Gold Club shuts down. Graeber overdosed on his own H six months later. That left Pelletier alone. At that point, he disappeared from all public records. He probably had fake IDs—maybe taken from this O’Connor fucker, or somebody like him. We don’t know where he went, but when he reemerged on the grid a few years later he was armed with all sorts of new techniques. We called him Musashi for a while after that. You know who that is?”

  Leon thought for a moment. “Japanese swordsman, right? Samurai?”

  “Yeah. A ronin. A wandering samurai with no master. One of the guys at the bureau, Hector Freedman, was a history buff, did some shinkendo—that’s a Japanese sword-fighting style—and read all about Miyamoto Musashi. Apparently Musashi was only a decent swordsman, but then he disappeared into the wilderness for several years, and when he came back he was unstoppable. Nobody knows what happened to Musashi during that time, just like we don’t know what happened to Pelletier during his little self-imposed exile. He was into this and into that. One minute it was a counterfeit scheme that netted him a hundred grand, then it was a sizable drug deal that gave him two hundred more.

  “Pelletier was all over the map with his scams. He’s one mercurial son of a bitch, this guy. Fickle. Changes his game constantly. The bureau f
irst picked up on him doing this scam where he created this website for men living secretly with homosexuality. He sent out fliers and shit. He got a few dozen responses. Pelletier pretended to be a conflicted young man looking for an older gay gentleman to show him the ropes. He would get replies from all over, everything from dirty old men living in log cabins and poring over the Internet for company, to some wealthier, established guys with families. He focused on the wealthy family men because they had more to lose by being exposed. He revealed who he was to them and started blackmailing them, threatening to expose their secret unless they paid X amount. Got away with this for a full year, made some good cash and then split when one of his victims finally got up enough guts to go to the police. FBI figured out who it was by tracking the IP addresses of the websites he created, finding where his base of operations was, which was some apartment building in Biloxi, and then getting a copy of his photo ID from the landlords and running his face through facial-recognition programs.

  “Pelletier’s face was now in the FBI’s National Registry system. His face popped up all over the Bible Belt over the next two years in video surveillance—auto theft, mail-order scams, confidence scams, and some other shit. It wouldn’t be until after he escaped Leavenworth that we were able to work out a timeline that matched all of this activity perfectly with a series of murders committed throughout the southern U.S., with a couple up north.”

  One of the ambulances was leaving with a load of three bodies in body bags. They had just closed up the back of the ambulance and blared their siren just once to tell a few cops to get out of their way. Leon and Agent Porter pressed up against a patrol car to let it pass. “Who were the victims?” he asked.