“And if he’s not the killer?”
“Got you covered there, too, sir. I think you’ll find I think of everything. There’s absolutely no way to hack that virus I zapped him with without the master key. It makes hacking cancer look easy and they’ve been trying to do that since forever. Unless, of course, you believe the conspiracy theorists that they actually had a cure a few decades ago, but it would cost them too much money to implement by way of lost revenue from drugs that simply forestall rather than cure cancer.”
Strangely, Ed had understood Klepsky’s intent even though he’d been far from clear. Klepsky was concerned that this Cray Willis character would then have all the free mental energy and time he needed to hack the virus and come after them. Because anyone smart enough to commit all those crimes, even if it wasn’t the one they were currently investigating, could easily become an even bigger problem for them.
“All right, Ed. Let me go see if I can find out what makes this guy tick. He has means and opportunity, despite all rational arguments to the contrary. Now he just needs motive, beyond hating the world in general, to suggest why this particular path to murder when all others were just as open to him. Which I guess brings me to my next question. Why, going from all his prior murders, did you pick him?”
“Um, I think I’ll just let you figure that one out for yourself, sir. Wouldn’t want to prejudice your thinking.”
Klepsky took a breath. Traffic had temporarily stalled before a red light. He decided to capitalize on the opportunity to extrapolate from Ed’s comment. “You mean he hates medical people because no one can cure him from whatever ails him and the proverbial if not the actual hit to the head he took in childhood. It’s not just incompetent MDs, it’s incompetent PhDs who can’t come up with the cutting edge medical breakthroughs fast enough.”
“And I think now you would be getting inside my head, sir, for a change.”
Deciding not to wait any longer on the light, Klepsky took a right turn in traffic, and the direction change triggered a change in his thinking as well. “What’s Adrian up to?”
“He’s out of commission for the rest of the day, sir. He’s with Dion.”
“Must be nice to work his kind of hours, walk into a crime scene, spend five minutes seeing everything no one else sees, then off for as long as he cares to take off.”
Ed giggled. “Yeah, I remember those days fondly. Being brilliant used to be easy, until they started playing us off one another. Now Adrian’s about the only one who can get away with that nonsense.”
Klepsky closed the cell phone. It had never stopped playing a dial tone for him. He’d just forgotten he was speaking to Ed over the car speakers. But Klepsky’s intent was clear enough; he had had enough talk for now.
ELEVEN
Despite Ed’s billing Bellevue as “Arkham”, and despite it being open since 1736, the complex was renovated, light-filled, spacious, and, well—the truly terrifying part—big enough to get lost in. Even a sane person could go crazy in here trying to find the front door. Maybe that was the idea, to keep the cost down on hiring security. “A building complex” wasn’t quite doing it justice; it was an enclosed city.
Klepsky stopped for a Starbucks in the lobby, craned his neck to appreciate the vaulted ceilings, and then took full advantage of his neck’s swivel feature to take in the patches of modern architecture and furnishings—however sterile—and the fact that he could virtually sun bathe in this section of the building.
True to his initial impression, he had to ask for help five times to get to the unit which housed Cray Willis. They could turn a tour of this place into the next Survivor TV series.
Finally, seated across from him on a round plastic table with rounded bench seating molded into the table—the only thing it was missing was the umbrella—was the man himself. Cray Willis wasn’t looking at him so much as through him, his eyes focused on the view out the window. Klepsky turned briefly to take it in. Parts of Bellevue faced the water, as it turned out; this was one of those parts. It occurred to him that it mightn’t be such a bad idea to situate the most violent, criminally insane patients in a section of the building with the most placid view. He was turning back around when Willis said, “Don’t turn around just yet. Give it just three more seconds, two, one.”
The schooner in the water, which Klepsky was certain he’d seen featured in the movie Squall, exploded. The fireworks were bright enough to overpower a gloriously sun-shiny day, the fiery oranges and yellows overcoming the pale blue sky by several magnitudes of intensity. “To celebrate your visit,” Cray said. Klepsky wondered how many souls were aboard; the ship was big enough to hold about thirty or more comfortably if it was at capacity. Then he reminded himself the death of rich people living the good life really weren’t his concern. It was the other ninety-nine percent of the population waiting in the wings for their turn that was. He swiveled back around to face Cray, understanding full well there wasn’t a damned thing he could do to him. He could get away with saying he was psychic and it would sound more convincing in a court of law than trying to explain how Cray, located inside a hospital suite with undercover security with eyes focused on him and some within arm’s reach, and with no access to mail, the internet, or a phone, did the deed.
“Alright, Cray, you made your point. But if you really want to get on my good side, you won’t just help the ninety-nine percent vent their rage, you’ll go after the bastard heading my department looking to make cuts in my division.”
Cray laughed a mad sounding laugh, which managed to sound genuine as opposed to rehearsed, though Klepsky doubted there was anything the least bit genuine about it. Cray also rocked back and forth while sucking on his thumb in a self-soothing gesture common to more than one mentally handicapped person Klepsky had witnessed in his day. He continued with that hyena-like laugh and rocked a while longer, then Snap! he pulled out of it. Sat up straight. Smiled at Klepsky. And took the deck of cards in front of him and started doing tricks with it, stage-show magician-style, absently, without looking at the cards, and with his eyes fixed on Klepsky. “So to what do I owe the honor of your visit today, Klepsky?”
Somehow the “sane” version of Cray Willis creeped Klepsky out more than the early-days Barnum and Bailey freak show act he was putting on a few seconds ago. The eyes were sharper than marble, more piercing than lasers. The intelligence oozed out of him like he was red hot with radioactivity. And the fingers playing the cards, long like a piano player’s, moved with the kind of dexterity and skill that screamed “get me around someone’s neck.”
Since Klepsky had already stated, in so many words, what had drawn him here, he presumed that Cray meant to infer that other guy doing the talking a moment ago was a split-personality he was not at all aware of. Hence he needed Klepsky’s question to be reiterated.
The only thought running through Klepsky’s mind right now was: who created this meritocracy anyway where only the smartest, shrewdest, Machiavellian mother fuckers rose to the top of economic and political power, and there was nothing left for anyone else to do but cheer or risk being squashed like a bug beneath one of these intellectual giants?
But the zoo attractions behind the glass-walled suites weren’t his focus today at Bellevue any more than they were on days when he’d toured Intel, IBM, Apple, and a host of other galleries of rogue intelligence.
“The fact of the matter, Cray—Can I call you Cray?—is that I could use your advice. Some mentoring from the master.” He figured he’d play to the guy’s ego; it was typically the one thing bigger than their intellects, and a lot easier to mess with than playing mental chess with a mental giant. “I’ve got a killer that many would say has to be you, because who else could be smart enough to pull off these murders, right? It would require aptitudes in more fields of science than I can shake a stick at, all of which I’m sure you mastered some time in kindergarten. But somehow I just don’t think it’s your style.”
Cray belched a chuckle that just escaped h
im despite his best efforts to play it cool. He was another chuckler like Ed, but, man, the tone couldn’t be more different. Contrasts between whites that white and blacks that black weren’t supposed to exist in the real world. “Yes, Golem Guy has been quite the talk of the town on the black internet.”
“Golem Guy? You mean you’re familiar with the case? But that’s…”
“Impossible? Because you’ve been keeping the lid on it. You forget that cameras are all around the Futurist, Adrian Maslow, all the time. The FBI keeps a close watch on him. And many of us keep a close watch on the FBI, among others. They like to think they have the best people running their cybersecurity. But we both know the best people are never for hire to anyone; we’re entrepreneurial by nature.”
“Okay, Cray, I’ll bite. Saves me having to withhold information from you which would be a crime, considering that fine mind of yours needs data to play with, the more the better, in order to come up with a superior determination to any we could come up with at the FBI, even the great Adrian Maslow. So, please, rescue us from ourselves.”
Another chuckle bubbled up from Cray like the volcano was getting ready to erupt. “Your superficial efforts to manipulate me notwithstanding, the fact is you play your part better than you know, Klepsky. I suspect a big part of you would like to be rescued from yourself. Actors are always best playing what they know. Very well.”
Klepsky allowed himself to be hypnotized by Cray’s finger dexterity making the cards sing for him. It seemed like the polite thing to do. And it actually seemed like Cray might be trying to hypnotize him to get him to open his mind more to see the truth for himself. Instead of sweeping any shocking revelations under the rug like he might be inclined to do if his rational mind couldn’t handle the truth.
Klepsky’s eyes migrated back to Cray Willis’s face. He had the preternatural beauty and the look of an angel, hell, an archangel. The long wavy hair and goatee just completed the picture. Klepsky realized it wasn’t the effect of the hypnosis causing him to see Cray that way, not entirely. His mind had just relaxed enough to take in more than the most salient details about him. The stuff that didn’t really matter, only they did, when you came at him from another angle.
Allowing his mind to drift back to the case, Klepsky thought, verbalizing his thoughts out loud, “The Golem isn’t the creature the killer is trying to manipulate. It’s the charm he’s using on Adrian. Adrian is the golem he wants to get to do his bidding. Could be one or another of us, of course, but why mess with second best when you can go after the guy more likely to be charmed by this degree of brilliance?”
Cray collected the cards, formed them back into a deck, and pounded the edges on the table. And just like that, Klepsky was out of the trance. “Nicely done, detective.”
“Thanks, Cray. I should tell you though you didn’t break the trance fast enough to keep me from seeing how you do what you do.” He leaned in and whispered at Cray, tapping his temple. “You’ve got wireless internet due to some chip you have inside your head. It’s a biochip, otherwise it would set off the scanners, probably totally indistinguishable from a cluster of skin cells or of some other tissue type.”
Klepsky was stunned by how much more lucid he was when in this altered state of consciousness.
Cray just smiled. “Are you going to tell on me?”
“Not when you’re determined to be so helpful, Cray. Birds of a feather have to stick together and all that. Never know when I have to come calling on the likes of you again. Could do worse than having you in my back pocket.”
Cray smiled a tight-lipped smile. “The avalanche of clichés aside, yes you could. What gave me away?”
“A couple of things. The curiously fresh mint spraying I got twice since sitting here. I thought it was something they were moving through the vents, possibly an anesthetic to keep you high-test types calm. But then I realized, that was you farting. No one farts minty fresh farts, Cray. The clue out of context would have escaped me. But I took a look at your file on the way in. You suffer from arthritis. That’s got to be hell for a card player like you. You needed a fix. That’s why you needed all those scientific aptitudes that got you on our radar and had my people profiling you as the Golem Guy. Easy enough mistake to make since you were both delving into similar areas of research, albeit to different ends. I see the arthritis problem is licked. Kind of frees your mind up for other things, doesn’t it? As to how you managed to build this next-generation tech, get it inside your head, well, that mystery for another time. Turns out I’m not quite so smart when I’m not under hypnosis.”
Finished leaning into one another as if the kiss were pending, only the camera filming the scene had jammed, they parted company again, sitting upright on their sections of arcing plastic bench.
“It’s Adrian I really want to pay me a visit. He’s the one that stands to benefit most from my hypnosis,” Cray said.
“Tempting, but no. We’re not exposing our queen on the chessboard just yet.”
“I suppose I can always pray you have no choice.”
“You do that.” Klepsky slipped out of his seat like a hermit crab crawling out of its shell—turns out there was no easy way to get up from a table like this—and donned his fedora.
“The detective persona from out of another era,” Cray said, “I get it. Invites people to drop their guard. Makes them think how could anyone from such simple times hope to get one over on me?”
“Like you said earlier, Cray, sometimes the best cons grow out of who you are. Each day the present keeps rocketing into the future, and I keep falling further into the past. What started just as an acting gig might well turn out to be who I am.”
Cray smiled at him and reverted back to his rocking and thumb-sucking and his silly giggling. From his scheming expression just prior to the personality shift, Klepsky got the impression he was already choreographing his next mass murder to celebrate Adrian’s inevitable visit. And this mindless rube he wore as a mask was just a cover for all the heated mental activity.
Klepsky no sooner turned his back on Cray Willis than he’d forgotten about him. The sad truth was, people like him were as common as white rice. What kind of society just kept spitting out sick sociopaths faster than Oreo cookies? Oh, that’s right, the one modeled on the American way, the one that prided itself on producing rugged individualists who could rise to the top by their own doing, without help from anybody. All it took was being a brighter sociopath than the next guy. That, and innumerable Machiavellian get-over-on-the-little-guy schemes that couldn’t be matched by competing sociopaths. No wonder people looked at Americans the way they did. We held up as a badge of honor the very thing we should have despised about ourselves. Like a patient with cancer focused solely on curing his heartburn.
Considering what he’d just given Cray Willis a pass on, maybe he shouldn’t be the one pointing the finger. Maybe you swim in the same muddy waters, you get as filthy as everybody else.
TWELVE
Rory swung the axe to split the log he’d just set on the tree stump. It wasn’t a particularly big log; that was the point. The whole idea was to work up a sweat properly without pulling any muscles and possibly throwing his back out.
By the tenth log, he was sweating like a champion race horse closing in on the finish line. An amazingly quick response, he thought. It didn’t help that fitness wasn’t particularly high up on his to-do list. He gazed up as he wiped his forehead at the sun rising over the hill on his hundred acre spread. It was peaceful out here. But “peace” came at a premium this close to New York City. So, undeveloped the land remained, save, of course, for the large barn behind him. Though he doubted it did much to take away from the “undeveloped” mystique of the place, not in the dilapidated state it was in.
Screams kept coming from inside the barn. “Help!” Seconds later: “Someone, please help!” Almost a half-minute later, indicating the caller was tiring: “Help me, God damn it!” The last outburst was followed by some sobs, punctuat
ed by screams meant to penetrate the air further with less effort than articulating actual words. The ruckus reminded Rory of the geese he once kept in the barn. Perhaps for that reason, to his mind, the cries for help added to the sense of peace.
Graduating past a couple mid-size logs to splitting a rather large one, Rory figured his warmup was complete. He headed back inside the barn.
There, waiting somewhat impatiently, was Mr. Randy Reardon, currently strapped to an examination table. A good thing Rory wasn’t writing about his life, or he’d have to have gone with someone with a different first name. Not a good idea as a rule to have more than one character whose name begins with the same letter in a novel, or at least so he’d been told.
“Why are you doing this?” Randy asked.
“It’s got nothing to do with you, Randy. From everything I read about you, you seem like a pretty nice guy.”
“Why then?”
Rory injected Randy with a pre-filled hypodermic that had been lying on the counter against one of the barn’s far walls. The counter, along with the cupboards underneath, had been meant to be installed in a kitchen. But for what Rory intended to cook up, he figured it was best situated out here in the barn. “This is to keep you from bleeding out when I start chopping you into little pieces. And to keep you conscious, of course. The fact is, I could use the company. It would be just awful if you couldn’t make small talk while all this was going on.”
The man screamed in frustration. He wasn’t much older than Rory. If Rory was pushing twenty, Randy was pushing twenty-five, more built. Rory was pretty scrawny by comparison, making swinging the long-handled axe such a chore. “I volunteer at the soup kitchen, for Christ’s sake!” Randy blurted, in a whiny, sobbing plea. “I coach little league. I do a marathon for breast cancer every year.”
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