Ashes, Ashes

by Charles Atkins

  Barrett unhooked her phone from her pants and tossed it to Glash. She looked at Lucinda’s panicked face and at the way Glash was handling her as though she were something less than human.

  ‘This is good news,’ he said, as he crushed the cell under his prison-issue boot. ‘Turn around, Dr Conyors, and lie flat on the ground. Carla, lie next to her.’

  ‘Richard,’ Carla started to plead, ‘don’t do this. Please don’t hurt anyone. It’s just going to make things worse for you.’

  Glash erupted. He let go of Lucinda’s hair; the young woman fell to her knees as Glash grabbed Carla, threw her to the ground and began to pistol whip her. ‘Don’t tell me what to do!’ he shrieked, as the attorney attempted to shield her face with her hands. But soon, a sickening blow to the head made her fall unconscious.

  Barrett, realizing that he might kill them all, blocked out the pain and barreled toward him. Before he could raise the firearm and get a clear shot she rammed into his body and jammed her injured elbow into his solar plexus. It should have been a crippling blow; it wasn’t. He grabbed her wrist and twisted it behind her back. His gun hand snaked around her neck in a sleeper hold. His six-foot-five frame held her immobile. She felt his arm tighten around her throat, shutting off the oxygen to her brain. She struggled and kicked, and fought the panic that told her she was about to die. She pictured her mother and Justine. You were right, Hobbs. And then everything grew dark.

  Barrett’s eyes opened to the sickening sound of gunfire – a single shot. She struggled to orient herself. She was seated upright in the truck. It had been turned around and in front of it was Glash, not ten feet away, standing over Lucinda Peters; Carla, still unconscious, was to their right. The girl wasn’t moving. Barrett’s hands were tied tight behind her back. Her fingers felt the hard plastic of ASP restraints. Where the hell did he get those? Were they in Carla’s truck? And what would she be doing with them? Those thoughts disappeared when Glash turned and made eye contact with Barrett. ‘Watch me,’ he said. From his back pocket he took out a large, stainless steel meat cleaver.

  She tried to look away. She did not want to see this, an image he’d painted hundreds, maybe thousands of times. He looked at her; his blue eyes bore straight into hers. ‘Dr Conyors, do not turn away. Do not close your eyes. Watch me. If you don’t I’ll kill the other one. Watch me!’

  ‘No, Richard.’

  ‘It’s already dead,’ he explained. ‘It won’t feel it.’

  It was a sick bargain, but the best she had. ‘OK, Richard,’ she said, thinking he’d probably end up killing them all. In a weird way, she understood why he wanted her to watch, as he grabbed hold of Lucinda’s long blonde hair and began to do the thing he’d painted all those hundreds of times. With no emotion, he looped Lucinda’s hair over his right hand and with the left proceeded to bring the cleaver down hard below her hairline.

  The sound of metal on flesh and bone was like a woodcutter chopping logs, only duller and wetter. Barrett’s eyes never moved but inside she felt a sense of horror, of things beyond her control.

  He worked quickly. When he was done, he stared at the young woman’s bare and bleeding scalp. He reached down and grabbed her left hand. He examined her engagement ring and then pried it off and dropped it into a pocket.

  She watched as he walked over to the still unconscious Carla, hoisted her up and then deposited her on the seat next to Barrett. He belted her in and then reached down and popped open the glove compartment. Inside, Barrett glimpsed half a dozen identical plastic cell phones. She suddenly realized that this could not be Carla’s truck. He slammed the door and she watched him in the rear-view mirror as he walked away and talked on the phone. She strained to hear, his voice low and monotone. At one point she could hear dimensions and measurements. ‘“A” is five-foot-three, red hair that is three to four inches over her forehead and short, like a man’s haircut on the back and sides. Green eyes. Her shirt is white, mother-of-pearl buttons one-point-three centimeters in diameter; made by Perry Ellis …’ This went on as he inventoried each item of clothing and the physical attributes of both her and Carla. He ended that call and then punched in a second number and left the phone on top of Lucinda Peters’ scalped corpse.

  He climbed into the cab, his shoulder brushing painfully against hers. He looked at Barrett, his breath warm on her face. ‘You will remember that?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, her mouth dry. She was barely able to speak, nearly paralyzed with fear. ‘Who were you talking to, Richard?’ she asked.

  He looked at her. ‘You’ll figure it out.’ He put the truck into drive and rather than heading back to the secondary road, he turned around and plunged them deeper into the woods.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Barrett asked, wondering if he’d answer, or beat her the way he’d beaten Carla … or kill her.

  ‘How many murders does it take to be famous?’ he asked, his tone almost conversational.

  ‘I don’t think there’s an actual number.’

  ‘It’s interesting, don’t you think, how we both know a lot about killers?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answered.

  ‘It’s something we have in common.’

  Barrett’s body ached and her brain wanted to forget the horrific images she’d just been forced to witness. What was he getting at? What did he want from her? ‘Yes, we have something in common. I would like to know where we’re going.’

  ‘To kill John J. Saunders,’ he replied. ‘Jane should have done it. I’ll do it for her.’

  Seven

  Hobbs was on the verge of losing it. How could this have happened? He glared across the light-filled office at Dr Felicia Morgan, Croton’s rail-thin medical director. Her phone hadn’t stopped ringing; she was on it now. Dressed in black, she seemed agitated and uncertain.

  ‘The FBI will be here within half an hour,’ she said, putting down the receiver and running a hand through her short-cropped hair. Three other lines were blinking red. She blew out a slow stream of breath and glanced at Hobbs. ‘One is the governor, two is my boss, the commissioner, and three is Channel Eight.’

  ‘Go with your boss if you have to and forget the other two.’ He knew she had priorities, knew that as an NYPD detective this wasn’t his jurisdiction, but right now he couldn’t care less. What mattered was Richard Glash kidnapping two women with Barrett in the back of his getaway vehicle over two hours ago, and as far as he could tell there wasn’t a fucking thing being done about it. He cracked his neck, feeling every muscle tense in his body.

  His cell rang and for a brief moment hope surged. Was it Barrett?

  ‘Hobbs?’

  It almost sounded like her. ‘Hey, Justine.’

  ‘Tell me she’s OK.’

  ‘How did you find out?’ he asked, the sound of her desperation fueling his.

  ‘I got this horrible message on my answering machine – I was in surgery so I couldn’t pick up. She was whispering and she sounded really scared … what the hell is happening?’

  ‘Your sister,’ Hobbs said, trying to keep the fury from his voice, ‘decided to throw her pregnant ass into the getaway car of a psychopath who’d just taken two hostages. When did she call?’

  ‘Just after eight.’

  ‘Nothing since?’ he asked, hopeful that there was still a chance she’d not been discovered.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘What?’ Justine asked.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.

  ‘Ed, please tell me. I’m about to lose my mind.’

  ‘It’s not good, none of this is good. I was having them use her cell phone to locate their position. It went dead twenty minutes ago. Not that far from here.’ He felt a burning rage. The delay in getting them to trace the call, the minutes it took to bring the state troopers up to speed, the criminal incompetence of the Croton guards – the fifty minutes it took him to drive from Manhattan, only to find the trail cold. He wanted to jump in his Crown Vic and chase after her
. But where?

  Justine sobbed. ‘We should have pushed harder. If we’d made her have that damned abortion, none of this would have happened.’

  ‘Sure, try getting your sister to do anything she doesn’t want to.’ He struggled to keep his tone light, but if Barrett had been there, he didn’t know which he’d do first, throttle her or kiss her. ‘Justine, I got to go. If you hear from her call me right away.’

  ‘Promise you’ll do the same.’

  ‘You got it,’ and he hung up. ‘So tell me about Glash,’ Hobbs said to Felicia, who’d just finished a rough call with her commissioner. Hobbs couldn’t yet figure if this intense-looking woman, with her dark clothes, trendy glasses and short hair, was friend or foe.

  ‘Barrett is pregnant?’ Felicia asked, having overheard Hobbs’s conversation. ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘You didn’t hear it from me,’ he said. ‘Please tell me everything you know about Glash.’

  The door opened and a frail-looking older man dressed for a cool day or a Bogart movie in trenchcoat, gray fedora, black wool pants and pressed white shirt, entered without being asked. ‘I’d probably better do that.’ He looked at Hobbs through thick glasses that distorted his pale eyes, like a goldfish looking out of a bowl; he took off his hat, scanned the various surfaces in the room, and placed it carefully on a stack of journals by the door. ‘You must be Detective Edward Hobbs,’ he said, without extending his hand. ‘I’m George Houssman, I don’t know if Barrett has ever mentioned me.’

  ‘She has,’ Hobbs said, wondering what the semi-retired professor was doing here.

  ‘Good.’ Houssman looked at Felicia and nodded. ‘By your expression, I’m assuming he’s not yet been caught?’

  ‘No,’ she said, glancing down at the flashing red lights on her phone.

  ‘Leave that alone, then,’ Houssman instructed. He looked at Hobbs. ‘Have a seat, young man.’

  Hobbs was about to argue, but something in the old guy’s manner – authority and something maybe more vulnerable – made him pull up a metal-framed armchair.

  ‘You have no idea,’ Houssman began, not sitting, ‘of how I hoped this day would never come. And now Barrett … He’ll come after me, too.’ He looked out of a barred window at the grounds below. In front of Croton’s main entrance yellow crime-scene tape ringed the transport vehicle that had carried Glash. The bodies of the two Marshals were only now being covered in white oilcloth bags.

  ‘Why would he go after you?’ Hobbs blurted, struggling to stay in his seat.

  Houssman paused, still looking out of the window. He nodded his head. ‘At least my wife is dead.’

  ‘Please spit it out,’ Hobbs said, not caring if he sounded rude, ‘if you know anything about this Glash.’

  Houssman turned and looked at Ed. There was something appraising in the way he examined the tall detective with his scarred face. ‘She’s like a daughter to me,’ Houssman said. ‘I understand your urgency, but what I have to say is something I’ve kept secret for nearly forty years. Now I have no choice. Richard Glash, if he’s not stopped, will come after me, my two daughters and my grandchildren. He will systematically kill everyone he believes has ever done him wrong. You see, for a very brief period, Delia – my wife – and I took in Richard Glash as a foster child, with the hope of one day adopting him.’

  Felicia, in awe of the esteemed pioneer in forensics, was about to speak and then stopped herself.

  Houssman glanced at her. ‘This is no time for niceties, Felicia. You wanted to ask why none of this is mentioned in Glash’s records.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t want it to be there, and this all happened long enough ago when it wasn’t so difficult to eliminate an uncomfortable detail or two from a medical record. Glash’s juvenile records are still sealed. On the list of things that must be done immediately is getting them and scouring them for every name and address connected with his early life. All those people, like me and my family, are in mortal danger. No more interruptions. I’ll go though the facts quickly’ – he looked at Hobbs – ‘because the last thing you want are the reminiscences of an old man.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Hobbs said. He looked intently at Houssman, his heart bounding in his chest.

  ‘Delia, and I couldn’t have children,’ he began.

  Hobbs groaned to himself, sensing a long and pointless story.

  ‘So we took in two foster children, the offspring of a woman who had killed her husband and was sentenced to serve thirty to fifty years. She had no other family, the children were young and it seemed a good option. It worked out well and a year later we adopted the two girls, our daughters – Stephanie and Alice.’ Houssman caught Hobbs’s eye. ‘I will go fast,’ he assured him. ‘Our two girls were well adjusted; we’d taken them in when they were three and five. So when I came upon the case of Peter Glash and realized that this four-year-old would be a ward of the state and needed a foster family, I thought that this might be the final addition to our family. I was cocky in those days, convinced that sociopathy was far more nurture than nature. Richard was a good-looking boy, although we knew right off he was also special.’

  ‘As in retarded?’ Hobbs asked.

  ‘Hardly, on standard IQ tests Richard scored high in the genius range. He was aloof and quiet and from the time he was old enough to hold a crayon or marker, he’d exhibited savant-like artistic abilities. His strangeness I put down to his intelligence and his early home life. I rationalized that if my wife and I pulled him from a bad environment, we could alter the course of his life for the better. I was horribly wrong, of course.’

  ‘What happened?’ Hobbs asked.

  Houssman blinked three times; he grimaced, the edges of his thin lips drew up as though he’d just tasted something bad. ‘My wife was sewing when Richard knocked on the Sullivan’s door. Their young daughter – Richard’s playmate – answered it. He attacked her. Delia, to her dying day, never recovered from the shock of that child’s screams and what she found. Richard Glash had taken a meat cleaver from the kitchen and tried to remove Mary’s scalp. Later, we’d discover that his inspiration had been a Western. It looked interesting to him, so he wanted to try it. It’s a miracle he didn’t succeed in killing that little girl. Delia got slashed trying to pull him off. She described it like he was some sort of animal.’

  ‘You couldn’t have known,’ Felicia said.

  Houssman glanced at her; his jaw was tight. ‘Of course not, and then again … I had evaluated his father. I should have been more careful.’

  ‘What was the father like?’ Hobbs asked, realizing that in a few seconds Houssman had given him more useful information than anyone else in the past two hours.

  ‘Not what I’d expected,’ Houssman continued, pleased that Hobbs was asking the right questions. ‘I went into his evaluation believing it to be a straightforward crime of passion. An older husband discovers his younger wife has been cheating and in a fit of fury bludgeons her to death. His attorney decides that it has the makings of a not-guilty-by-reason-of-mental-defect plea and the case gets sent my way for an expert opinion.’

  ‘And?’ Hobbs prompted, wanting to speed the old man up.

  ‘Peter Glash could not have done anything in passion. He was cold, and his every action was carefully considered. A man incapable of blind rage. I remember thinking that he embodied the age-old truth: revenge is a meal best served cold. The murder of his wife was deliberate. It occurred weeks after he’d discovered her affair with a purveyor who made deliveries to their candy business. There was no evidence of psychosis. He told his story repeatedly without changing a detail. No psychiatric diagnosis fit. He was not schizophrenic or manic depressive. In hindsight, his diagnosis was likely the same as his son’s.’

  ‘Which is?’ Hobbs asked.

  ‘Asperger’s.’

  ‘What the hell is that?’

  ‘Look,’ Houssman said, ‘I promised not to bog you down in details so let me give you what’s useful. It�
�s a form of autism that does not include mental retardation. It’s far more common in boys and frequently travels through the men in a family. No one knows where it comes from – there are many theories. The core defect is an inability to comprehend social interaction. People with Asperger’s are typically very obsessional; things need to be done in a specific way, at a specific time. If they’re prone to violence – and the vast majority are not – their anger is often triggered by a variation in routine or by being told “no”. To an outsider it could be as trivial as putting the pillows on their bed in a different manner, or leaving a window open a hair’s breadth more than usual. Peter Glash’s reason for killing his wife was that women are supposed to be faithful to their husbands. She strayed from his rigidly held belief, and because of that she needed to die at his hand. He had some biblical quotes he’d spout. I recall something about stoning harlots.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He went to prison, of course. That would have been nearly forty years ago.’

  ‘Is he still in?’ Hobbs asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ Houssman replied, ‘but it’s easy to check.’

  ‘Any more about Richard Glash?’ Hobbs pressed.

  ‘Felicia, I assume you have his records on hand?’

  ‘Just the prison and arrest records. I need a court order for everything before his eighteenth birthday. I did get these,’ she said, pushing a large sealed cardboard box marked ‘inmate belongings’ to the edge of her desk. ‘It came ahead of the transport wagon.’ She looked up at Hobbs and then at Houssman. ‘I didn’t open it for fear of contaminating any potential evidence.’

  Hobbs had no such qualms and flicked open the red Swiss Army knife he used as a key chain and ripped through the red-and-black striped tape. Houssman looked on as Hobbs rapidly unpacked the contents and laid them out on Felicia’s desk. First a stack of artist’s spiral-bound sketchpads. ‘Jesus,’ he muttered as he flipped through page after page of nightmarish murder scenes. ‘I know this one,’ he said, looking at a charcoal sketch that depicted the excavation of the crawl space beneath John Wayne Gacy’s house. Partially exhumed corpses and skeletons broke through the surface of their shallow graves. A sweat-covered Gacy was caught in half-profile, stooped over, a young man’s naked body off to the side.