• • •
I stared at those simple words a long time. Memorized every line and curve of each letter. Until, by the time I walked back toward Castillo again, I could feel its power still burning within me.
I even moved in deliberate, slow steps through the swings and stopped to shove the swing bridge that connected the two halves of the huge castle swing set. Watched it sway back and forth in the darkness. Darkness I no longer feared. I was almost daring it, HER, to even try coming for me.
My father might have spent his life living in such fears. But I refused to.
I heard night bugs chittering. And frogs maybe. Or an owl.
Or the ghosts of a mother and her two children screaming.
Castillo had said the woman’s husband had been brought in for questioning. The simple answer, probably not the right answer.
Castillo had also said a boy had been found murdered in nearby Vincent, Ohio. That the boy had been sixteen. He’d played varsity volleyball and caddied at Pinehill golf club. His name was Howell. Rick Howell. Students from his school were crying and stuff on TV, saying what a supernice kid he was. And no one understood why someone would beat a person like that to death.
But none of them knew that Richard Howell was the DSTI-manufactured clone of some guy named Richard Ramirez. A killer called “The Night Stalker.” A guy who broke into houses when everyone was asleep and then murdered and raped, like, a dozen families. I wondered if his classmates would still be crying and carrying on if they knew THE TRUTH. Would his classmates still be crying if they’d seen my father’s notes?
The Starry Night. Van Gogh’s most famous painting crudely mimicked.
My dad had taken me to see it at this exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Something from our shared life together.
VINCENT van Gogh. Vincent, Ohio. Right near Route 50 again.
Another clue seemingly just for me. One I hadn’t gotten until AFTER this kid had been killed.
Was I supposed to find these notes, these kids? Did my dad expect me to free them? Or to stop the others from doing what they’d done. Or . . . was this something my dad and I were supposed to be doing together? If I ditched Castillo and figured out enough of these clues, would I eventually catch up with my father? Was he just testing me? (I still wouldn’t let that idea go.)
Then why’d he leave you, you dumb dick? Why won’t he see you now?
The negative thoughts rushed back in with all the questions.
EXTREME FOR LIFE, I hollered triumphantly in my head. Tried chasing the bad thoughts away with this ridiculous new mantra. Some of the questions too, maybe. Questions I didn’t yet want answers to.
• • •
Castillo spent maybe thirty minutes in the park before we were back on the road again.
In the car I asked him if he thought it’d been THEM. The bad kids.
Don’t really know, he replied.
I said: Yeah, you do.
The car moved away from the rising sun toward Hitchcock.
If I was wrong about Hitchcock, we’d have wasted hours. If I was right, God only knew what we’d find. I think we were both hoping I was wrong.
I closed my eyes and tried unsuccessfully to sleep.
The orange letters in my memory already fading with each mile.
• • •
Oh, and as to why this particular clone had been murdered but others were allowed to live, your guess is as good as mine. And Castillo had no idea either. I mean, how did these guys decide which clones to kill that very first night at Massey? Were they following orders? My dad’s orders? Or was there just something they hadn’t liked about Rick Howell?
Something in his eyes that said NOT ONE OF US.
• • •
And if so, what would they see if they looked into my eyes.
• • •
The rest of the morning moved by in a blur of fields, one-church towns, and Dairy Queens. Ohio and Indiana were kinda boring.
Or not.
Just down the road there’d been a holdup a few days before. Couple of teens, a boy and a girl, tortured and killed behind some store. The town sheriff said it was related to drug gangs.
Castillo wasn’t so sure.
And also the two women found murdered in Unity. They’d just found the mom and another male victim in the apartment across the hall. Still looking for the older daughter.
Castillo wasn’t so sure.
We mostly drove in silence still. I held my hand outside the window and rode waves on the wind. Tried to vanish. Castillo talked to someone on the phone. He mostly just grunted short answers, and I couldn’t figure out what they were talking about. At some point I knew they were talking about the missing girl.
He thought maybe this one girl had joined up with the other guys. That she was even helping them. Turned out he was right.
• • •
The girl’s name was Emily Collins, and, the authorities suspect, she met one of the guys on Facebook and agreed to “party.” Guy had funny instant messages about blowing up malls and raping soccer moms and wild Snapchat pics. She thought he was a riot. Next thing you know, her roommate and sister and mom were dead. And also some guy who lived in the next apartment. And also, a couple of days later, her. (They found her body in an Indiana dumpster.)
There are, it turns out, some girls who actually find serial killers hot. Like musician or sports groupies. It’s called “hybristophilia.” It’s not the norm, obviously. But it’s more common than you would ever think.
The original Ted Bundy confessed to killing thirty women and still received hundreds of letters every single month from girls all across the country. He was visited by dozens of them and even married one while in jail.
Henry Lee Lucas killed two hundred people. He only had one eye. He also had hundreds of female admirers and also got married in prison.
John Wayne Gacy, the clown guy, was overweight and gay, and even he got fan mail from GIRLS every day and married a woman while in prison.
The Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez (the genetic source of the boy murdered in Vincent, Ohio, two days ago), raped and murdered twenty women, and there were lines of suitors outside the courthouse every day to see him. Lines. During the trial, one woman sent him a cupcake on Valentine’s Day with the message “I LOVE YOU.” That woman was on the jury. Later, he married an editor from Teen Beat magazine, who has sworn to kill herself when he is finally executed.
I apologized for all guys earlier.
Someone else can apologize for this.
• • •
Castillo wouldn’t tell me who he’d been talking to, but I kept giving him crap, and eventually he admitted it was a friend of some kind. Some type of shrink who was helping him with this case. I suspected it was this Kristin girl who Ox had mentioned at the ballpark, and the fact that he’d even admitted he was talking to a friend who was a shrink was surprising enough, really. I kinda think he wanted to talk about her, you know? He wanted to make her more real while we were driving in that car. But when I tried to find out any more, Castillo had no interest in pursuing that line further.
So I tried instead asking him what his nightmare was about. The one from the other night when he’d woken up screaming. Again he acted like nothing had happened. But he was totally flustered. He knew I knew. He was embarrassed, too.
I figured it was as good a time as any to maybe tell him some of the things I’d been seeing. Not all of it. But just that I understood, I guess. Maybe I was just hoping he’d tell me the same thing. It was time to get some of my nightmares out into the sun. It was time to maybe get “Extreme for Life.”
So I was thinking about first telling Castillo about the dreams with Ted. The Woman in the Black Dress. The murder I’d seen/imagined. The face at the ballpark. Maybe even all of it.
To start, I admitted out loud that I “saw stuff.”
Generic enough so I could see how Castillo would react. Good thing.
Castillo replied
: What kinda stuff? You tell me “I see dead people,” I’m gonna kick your ass right out of the car.
He was making a joke but I didn’t know that. Because I didn’t know how he knew. (I didn’t yet know he was making a reference to some movie I’d never seen.) But he clearly didn’t want me to bring night thoughts into the daylight and I retreated quickly. Dropped the whole conversation.
I let the silence hang for another couple of minutes and then asked Castillo about his scars. If he didn’t want to talk about imaginary things, the least he could do was tell me something about something real. I pointed at the scar that ran the length of Castillo’s arm.
Fishing, he replied.
I tried again and he told me to take a nap.
I tried again.
War, Castillo said, and shifted to maybe hide the scar better.
He said: Someone cut me.
What about the others? I asked.
Yeah, he said. Those, too.
• • •
He’d tried to hide them. But we’d been together a good week now. Even trying NOT to look, I’d caught enough glimpses. More than enough. Pale scars almost completely covered his stomach and chest. The marks crisscrossed the defined muscles in continuous disfigurement and design, wrapped over his shoulders and arms. Weird symbols. (I learned later they were Persian letters.) Others were something else, foul characters no one has yet determined. There were snakes with too many heads, and bugs with human hands, and trees split open and filled with fangs. And eyes. Staring eyes. Etched in flesh.
• • •
I asked if he’d ever gotten the guy who did it. The guy who’d cut him, I mean. I was thinking I’d sure want to if someone had done that to me. (I was wrong, I found out later.) Castillo adjusted the rearview mirror a fraction. He said he didn’t remember too much. It was certainly reasonable if he’d blocked that out. But still, I couldn’t tell if he was lying.
I asked him about WAR and he just blew me off. Told me it was loud.
So I asked him if he’d ever killed anyone.
He cursed at me and told me to shut up. (Talking to Castillo was a real treat those days.)
So I shut up. For a while. Until I saw a couple of kids playing in the front yard up ahead and got my nutty brain thinking again.
I asked what he supposed DSTI was doing with Ed right now. I was referring to Edward Bryce Albaum again. The kid we’d found together, the kid I’d likely sent to his doom.
No clue, Castillo said. Told you last night: He’s not my job anymore. He’s DSTI’s job now.
Those little kids waved at us as we passed. I couldn’t help but wonder if recently they’d waved at anyone else interesting on this same road. Maybe a carload of travelers, teens, also headed toward Hitchcock. The kind of travelers/teens you shouldn’t ever wave to.
I waved back.
Perfect, I said to Castillo. Then I’m sure he’s doing just great.
Castillo didn’t reply, turned up the radio. He’d discovered a whole new way to blow me off.
We drove without speaking another twenty miles. It felt like a hundred.
• • •
The Sizemore family lived on 7422 OldeGate Lane.
I waited in the car while Castillo went to check if they were dead.
Or if, best case, their son was the clone of a vicious killer.
Another experiment cooked up in some lab. The clone of Gary Ridgway. The “Green River Killer.” A guy who killed almost a hundred women in the Northwest during the ’80s and ’90s.
So maybe Hitchcock, Indiana, looked just like anywhere/everywhere else. The same houses and fences and trees and dogs and families. But it wasn’t. Not, if I was right, according to my dad’s notes.
Maybe this family’d been paid to molest this kid. Or encourage him to drink. Maybe this family’d been paid to just leave him alone. Or maybe one family had no idea where this kid had really come from. Or maybe, rather probably, the black bird in my dad’s batshit-crazy notes had nothing to do with Alfred Hitchcock at all.
And just maybe, rather probably, my dad hadn’t wanted his freak son to ever help solve ANYTHING.
It’d been a whole week. I could hardly wrap my head around it. But sitting alone in that car, it was sure becoming clearer and clearer that I was alone. Alone-alone. And there wasn’t another single person on Earth who wondered where I’d gotten to. Not a single one. My name wasn’t in any papers. No one was searching for me. Some woman and her kids vanished, and half the state was looking for them. My own dad didn’t even care where I was.
What kind of life was this?
And I was totally conning myself into thinking that Castillo gave a damn about me or my situation. To him, I was just another dirty piece of the grand experiment. Another clone freak. Something to hunt and capture. Something to turn over to DSTI when it was time. No different from any of the other kids from the facility. No different at all.
In the name of science. For the betterment of man. Et cetera. Et cetera. To understand what caused aggression, violence, evil. Isolate it. Cure it. Control it. Then to one day unleash it again.
The Cain Gene.
Was it really only a matter of the chromosomes floating around in our blood?
If so, I wasn’t stupid. I’d read enough Warhammer paperbacks and watched enough Syfy channel to get the big picture. And if fiction ain’t your thing, I’d heard what they’d found at Shardhara. I could EASILY imagine biological weapons that would infect the enemy with a murderous hate so bad they’d turn and kill one another. Or provisional injections of rage to boost aggression and strength in battle-fatigued troops.
No wonder the Department of Defense was running the show.
Castillo appeared around the corner, moved casually toward the car.
He got in and started the car to pull away. Looked kinda mad again and didn’t say a word.
I assumed Hitchcock had been a total bust. So I apologized.
For what? Castillo frowned. You just found another clone.
• • •
The kid’s family was still alive and everything.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Castillo recognized the boy from his picture.
The picture of Gary Ridgway, I mean.
The original Ridgeway had fifty CONFIRMED kills in Washington state and was suspected of another forty. Mostly preyed on runaways and prostitutes and kept their bodies hidden in various woods so he could “visit” them again later. When he was sixteen, he’d stabbed a little kid because he’d “wondered what it was like to kill someone.” He was in jail in his seventies now.
His clone was a hundred yards away.
Like father and son, Castillo said. A “spitting image.”
Castillo’d been trained to look at a photo once and know the person by sight immediately. Seriously. Our government trains people to do stuff like this. Castillo said he’d found terrorist guys who had gotten nose jobs and face-lifts and totally changed their hair and beards. One guy, he said, had been disguised as a woman for two years, and Castillo claimed he’d slapped the guy in his nuts when they’d found him. Castillo was messed up.
OK, the idea, the plan, the strategy, was to wait THEM out. Whether or not THEM was three guys now or seven, Castillo didn’t know. But he knew they’d killed the Albaums and probably some others along their way west.
And—thanks to me—we’d gotten to Sizemore first.
IF they were working from the same “list,” IF they knew Sizemore was a clone, they’d eventually show up. Or maybe even my father. Eventually . . .
Castillo said: The problem with TV shows is that they make it seem like stakeouts involve parking the car outside a house and staring at it until something happens. But neighbors eventually notice strange cars sitting on their street and dial 911. So we had to be somewhere else when/if the “shit went down.”
There were two empty houses to choose from. Both for sale. One was directly across the street from the Sizemore house. The other was down the street
on an adjacent cul-de-sac. (FOR SALE! REDUCED PRICE! MOVE-IN READY! ) Castillo said: I love this housing market.
He explained that sometimes overseas the soldiers would have to commandeer a house.
Castillo said: I am half prepared to do that here, too. I think he was tired of all of it too.
Instead we waited until it was two in the morning, and he broke into the cul-de-sac house. The house was empty, furniture removed, the last owners long since having moved on. As Castillo had surmised, the top right back bedroom window looked out perfectly over OldeGate Lane.
He set down the recently purchased foldout chair and a bag of groceries. He’d left the car three blocks away, with plans to move it to a new street each day.
I told Castillo we were gonna get busted but he just shook his head and tossed me something.
It was a paperback. The Pillars of the Earth. Something about building a Gothic cathedral in England. What’s this for? I wondered out loud.
Castillo said: You said you were a reader. He positioned his new lawn chair at the back window. Unless you wanted a romantic thriller, he said. That’s all the store had.
I flipped through the book. It was, like, eighty thousand pages long and weighed fourteen pounds. I had the feeling Castillo had bought it only because it was the biggest one they’d had. Guess he thought we were gonna be in an empty house awhile.
Castillo watched me, looked like he wanted to say something, and then turned to look out the window again.
Project Cain (Project Cain) Page 16