Richard Ramirez. Rick Howell. The boy murdered in Vincent, Ohio, two days ago. Apparently played varsity volleyball and caddied and . . . “I know that name also,” Castillo replied.
“He 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.’ Want the punch line?”
“Do you have to ask?”
“That woman was on the jury.”
“Jesus,” Castillo breathed. He imagined the two girls still hanging with those motel assholes back in Pennsylvania. “That’s fucked up.”
“Maybe not. They’ve done several studies on orangutans and gorillas, and the most violent males in the group always get the most ass. It’s a biological fact.”
“You implying we’re no better than monkeys?”
“I didn’t run the tests, so no. But everybody knows girls always secretly like the bad boys best.”
“And serial killers are as bad as it gets.”
“I guess.”
“Hybristophilia . . . incredible.”
“Still a quick study, I see.”
“Have to be. Or people die.”
“Yeah.” A long pause again. “Anything else?”
“Not that I can think of now.”
“You know my number. Take care of yourself also, Castillo.”
“Later.” He hung up and laid the phone on the dashboard.
“Who was that?” Jeff asked.
“Don’t worry about it.” Castillo glanced at him. “What’s that you’re working on?”
Jeff tucked the list away. “Don’t worry about it.”
Castillo shook his head. “Fair enough.”
After a moment, Jeff spoke again. “A list of states I’ve seen so far. License plates. The last car was Indiana, but it looked weird, so . . .”
“So, how many you got?”
Jeff pretended not to hear, and Castillo drove in absolute silence for another couple miles.
“Thirty-two,” Jeff said. “Who is she?”
“She who?”
“Girl on the phone.”
“A friend who knows a thing or two about how the mind works.”
“What’d she tell you?”
Castillo said, “Thirty-two? Not bad for these back roads.”
“I started in Jersey. What’d she say?”
She said once you were the worst of them all. And that the evil inside you was almost off the charts.
Castillo raised his brows, staring at the road ahead. “She said the world’s a curious place.”
“Oh.” Jeff nodded, then asked, “What was your nightmare about?”
Castillo’s hands reflexively tightened on the wheel. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“You screamed the other night. Back in the motel when we were sleeping.”
Ah, shit. “Did I?” He half remembered doing so, but . . . “I don’t . . . nothing.” Half remembering was enough. He grimaced. You REALLY want to know, kid?
He could tell that Jeff wanted to say something more. “What? What is it?”
“I have them too sometimes,” the boy said.
“What? Nightmares? Good for you. You, me, and everyone else.”
“Yeah, OK. Mine are kinda different, I think . . .”
Something cold twisted in Castillo’s abdomen. Something primal. No, no, no. “OK. I don’t really want to—”
“Mine happen in the daylight sometimes. Or, like, well, maybe stuff right before I fall asleep.”
Despite himself, Castillo looked over. “What kinda stuff ? You tell me ‘I see dead people,’ I’m gonna kick your ass right out of the fucking car.”
“Nothing. I don’t know. Nothing.” Jeff’s voice trailed off, his last thoughts held private after consideration. Fine by Castillo. The last thing he wanted to know about was the images rolling around in this creepy kid’s head.
I dreamed about YOU, Jeff. Is that what you want to hear?
The cold knot in Castillo’s gut tightened, still stronger than the guilt that came on its heels.
“How’d you get that?” Jeff asked.
Castillo glanced over again. The boy was pointing at the scar that ran the length of Castillo’s arm. “Fishing,” he replied. “Dude, take a nap or something.”
“You want me to drive awhile?”
Castillo watched the road, half smiled. “No, thank you.”
“So . . . ,” Jeff asked again. “How’d you get it?”
“War.” Castillo fixed his sleeve to hide the scar better.
“How?”
“Someone cut me.”
“What about the others?”
He meant the other scars. They’d roomed together long enough now. Jeff had certainly seen them. “Yeah. Those too.”
“Did you get the guy who did it to you?”
Castillo adjusted the rearview mirror a fraction.
“Did you?”
“No. Yeah. I don’t know. But I think so, yes. I got rescued. Don’t remember much.”
“What’s it like?”
Being tortured? Being meat? “What?” Castillo prompted.
“War?”
“War’s hell.”
“That’s just a cliché.”
“Well, it’s a good one.”
“What’s it really like?”
“You going to war?” Castillo asked.
“No.”
“Then what you askin’ for?”
Jeff retreated to his window.
“Loud,” Castillo answered. “It’s mostly loud.”
“Did you . . . did you kill anyone?”
“Original fuckin’ question.”
“Did you?”
“Shut up.”
Jeff shifted in his seat, looked out the window at the car they’d passed. “What do you suppose they’re doing with Ed right now?”
“Who? The Albaum kid? No clue. Told you before: He’s not my job anymore.” Castillo reached for the radio. Behind a chain-link fence, several children waved at them as they passed. “He’s DSTI’s job now.”
“Perfect,” Jeff said, waved back at the kids. “Then I’m sure he’s doing great.”
Castillo didn’t reply, turned up the radio.
They drove another twenty miles without speaking.
Castillo imagined the nightmares the kid might have been having. Could only guess at what was in the boy’s mind and hope he was guessing wrong. He tried fast to think of other things.
His own nightmares had changed. In the past, they were always about the boy, Shaya, or The Cave. Being back in the cave. But now this new one—two, maybe three times. In the past week. And it didn’t help that the cause was always sitting a foot away. That the cause slept across the room from him each and every night.
He thought again of simply pulling over on the side of the highway and cutting the kid loose. Or making the call and turning Jeff Jacobson over to DSTI. Surely that would end the dreams. Would end the issue of having to lie to Stanforth every time they spoke. Of having to lie to Kristin.
But he couldn’t. Not today. Not yet. Jeff actually had some good info, some good ideas. They were less than twenty miles away from a home that could have a clone in it, who was likely a target. If this lead panned out, he had no doubt the Jacobson kid could figure out some more of his fucked-up father’s doodles. Figure out where more of these kids were.
More important, Jeff Jacobson was his good-as-gold insurance policy. If anyone ever got too squirrelly, from Stanforth to Erdman, if he ever felt a screw job coming, he had the boy. Leverage. An actual clone of Jeffrey Dahmer, paid for, in part, by the United States military. WikiLeaks or Rachel Maddow would sure have some fun with that. The mission had already gone too dirty for things not to get worst-case soon. How soon? Would he have enough time to dig back out?
He glanced over at the boy. Jacobson stared straight ahead, eyes half closed to the midday sun. Hi
s hand hung partway out the window, making tiny waves in the wind outside.
In the new dream, Jeffrey stood over Castillo’s bed, his face continually morphing between the kid riding shotgun and the other man Castillo knew only from the file photos. The first Jeffrey Dahmer. The man who’d murdered, raped, and partially eaten at least seventeen men. The killer who’d infamously admitted, “I bite.” That face blending with the boy’s. Both faces were always slick with dark, dripping blood.
In the new dream, Castillo could never move. Could not look away as the inhumanly oversized teeth eventually widened, stretched even longer, and then sank deep into his flesh. He could only scream and pray it was solely a dream again. That he would wake. That the monster sleeping in the same motel room each night, hardly ten feet away, had not finally revealed its true self.
I bite.
“Got Alabama?” Castillo asked and nodded to the car they were passing.
“Thirty-three!” the monster beamed.
LIKE LIONS
JUNE 08, WEDNESDAY—HITCHCOCK, IN
Jeff waited in the car while Castillo went to check on the clone.
The Sizemore family lived on 7422 Oldegate Lane, but Castillo had parked the car a couple blocks away.
Hitchcock, Indiana, looked like anywhere else to Jeff. The same houses and fences and trees and dogs and families as any other town. All alike, except maybe for one. According to his fake father’s notes, maybe one family in Hitchcock had a son who’d been cooked up in a lab. Maybe one family in Hitchcock was raising the clone of Gary Ridgway, the “Green Valley Killer,” who’d murdered almost a hundred women in the Northeast during the ’80s and ’90s. Maybe one family’d been paid to molest the kid. Or to encourage him to drink. Maybe one family’d been paid to leave him alone. Or maybe one family had not clue one where this kid had really come from. Or maybe the bird pic in his father’s lunatic notes had nothing to do with Alfred Hitchcock at all. Probably Jacobson hadn’t wanted his freak son to ever help solve ANYTHING.
It’d been almost a whole week. Jeff could hardly wrap his head around it. It was clear there wasn’t another person on earth who wondered where he’d gotten to. Not a single person. His name wasn’t in the papers. No one was searching for him. His own dad didn’t even care where he was. What kind of life is this? And to Castillo he was another dirty piece of the grand damn experiment. Another clone freak. Something to hunt and capture. Something to turn over to DSTI when it was time. No different than any of the other kids from the facility. No different at all. In the name of science. For the betterment of man. Etcetera. Etcetera. To understand what caused aggression, violence, evil. Isolate it. Cure it. Control it. Then to one day unleash it again.
The Cain Gene.
Is it really just a matter of the chromosomes and enzymes floating around our blood?
If so, Jeff wasn’t stupid. He’d read enough Warhammer books and watched enough Syfy Channel and Jason Bourne movies to get the big picture. “Imagine Greater.” Ha! Well, he could easily imagine biological weapons that would infect the enemy with a murderous rage. Or provisional injections to boost aggression and strength in battle-fatigued troops. No wonder the Department of Defense was running the show.
And where, exactly, does Castillo come in? That was still a mystery to Jeff. The guy clearly worked for DSTI and the government. But he also kept a clone of Jeffrey Dahmer hidden in his motel room. At first, he’d figured Castillo’d brought him along only to fill in some of the info gaps. But he had most of that now and was still dragging Jeff along. Sure, there were a couple more notes to figure out, but there was something else. As far as Jeff knew, Castillo hadn’t told anyone about him yet. Why?
Castillo appeared around the corner, walked casually toward the car.
Jeff sat up as Castillo got in and started the car to pull away. “Sorry,” Jeff said.
“For what?” Castillo frowned. “You just found another clone.”
• • •
“What if someone comes?” Jeff asked in the darkness. “A Realtor or someone?”
“They won’t.” Castillo carried in a recently purchased foldout chair and a bag of groceries. There’d been two empty houses to choose from. 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! Castillo set the food down. “I love this housing market,” he said, setting the chair by the window. “Sometimes we’d have to commandeer a house for a base.” He peered out the window onto the neighborhood below. “I was half prepared to do that here, too,” he added.
He’d waited until two in the morning and broken into the home on the cul-de-sac. Empty, furniture removed, the last owners long since moved on. And, as Castillo surmised, its top-right bedroom window looked out perfectly over Oldegate Lane.
“Here,” he said, turning and reaching into the food bag, and tossing Jeff a thick paperback.
“What’s this?”
“You said you were a reader.”
Jeff turned the novel over. Something by some guy named Follett.
“Sorry,” Castillo said, positioning his chair. “Unless you wanted romance, that’s all they had. Closest thing to a fantasy book I saw.”
Jeff studied the back cover. “Thanks,” he said.
Castillo watched him, looked like he wanted to say something, then turned to look out the window. “So, here we are,” he said.
Jeff walked over behind the chair. “What now?” he asked.
“Now? Ever seen a lion hunting a zebra on the Discovery Channel?”
“Sure,” Jeff said.
“Now we’re lions,” Castillo said and settled back in his chair.
• • •
Being a lion proved boring.
It had been two days of nothing to do. They never, ever left the house. Just sat and watched another house. Castillo never talked. Jeff slept on the floor in the upstairs room behind Castillo and his chair. They ate peanut butter sandwiches and cold hot dogs together in silence. Jeff tried reading the book Castillo’d bought him. It was actually pretty good, because it had stuff about the Hundred Years War and witches and the plague. But it was also, like, a thousand pages, and it made him sleepy. He spent time mostly wandering through the empty house. Tried imagining what the family who’d lived here was like. What furniture had been in each of the now-empty rooms? Were they a normal family with a mom and dad and kids? Or one like his? He explored each room, running his fingers across bare walls where once there’d been hanging pictures and knickknacks, their phantom outlines bound in muted stains. What had the pictures shown? he wondered. His own room back in Jersey had been turned into a space as empty and ghostlike. He took watch a couple hours each day so Castillo could get some sleep. Staring out a window at a house where nothing ever really happened was easy. Once they’d seen the mom drive out to do some food shopping. Big thrill, right? Once he’d seen the boy, little Gary Sizemore, play basketball in the driveway for a bit. Another freak his father had made.
Castillo said that according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 45 percent of adoptions in the United States occurred through private arrangements. That was about seventy thousand babies a year trading hands that no one really knew anything about.
Kids like me. How easily it might have been him Castillo was now watching. Adopted out to some unsuspecting family. Maybe even a family that was paid to abuse him. Jeffrey Sizemore. And how easily the Gary kid could have ended up as Gary Jacobson. All these little clone babies. It was nothing more than a dozen cosmic coin flips.
Jeff watched Castillo awhile, frozen half asleep at his post by the window. Guy was never really asleep. “Wanna know how Dolly got her name?” Jeff asked him across the darkened room.
Castillo shook his head.
“Do you even know who Dolly is?”
“Nope.”
“Liar.”
“Yup.” Castillo sighed. Half smiled. “OK, how’d Dolly get her name?”
“The scientists made her from a cell that’d been taken from another sheep’s mammary. Mammary’s a fancy word for ‘breasts,’ and there was this country singer named Dolly Parton who was basically famous for having really big breasts. So the scientists called the sheep Dolly.”
“So,” Castillo said as he turned, “the most significant experiment of the last hundred years, the scientific advancement which brought man closer to God than any other before or since . . . was a tit joke.”
“Yeah,” Jeff said. His back was against an empty wall, his legs out straight. “They’re never gonna come, you know.”
“Never’s a long time,” said Castillo. “It’ll probably be less than that. Patience.”
“Waste of time.”
“Not if we’re right. If you’re right. All I know is there’s a thirteen-year-old kid named Sizemore a hundred yards away. Kid who doesn’t look a damn thing like his parents. These guys went to Delaware, and Ohio, and Indiana. They’ve got the exact same list we do.”
“My dad’s list? Yeah. You know anything about Mendel?” Jeff asked.
“Didn’t he have really big tits?”
Jeff laughed. “Nooooo.”
“Sure he did. The pea guy, right?”
“After peas, he worked on some plant called hawkweed.”
“You and your dad ever talk about the Phillies?”
“Not even once. So, this famous biologist in Germany read Mendel’s paper on peas and wrote to him, said he’s gotta give this hawkweed stuff a try. The guy was, like, the only real biologist who ever wrote to Mendel. Said he’d experimented with hawkweed before and even sent Mendel some seeds to help get him started.”
“I’ve heard about the peas.”
“ ’Cause hawkweed didn’t work. Has a very weird, um, ‘reproductive pattern.’ Random like. Even makes clones of itself sometimes, instead of true offspring, to keep things interesting. Mendel’s notes and ideas on heredity suddenly made no sense. He wrote a paper and admitted to the whole world he couldn’t repeat his pea experiments with the new plant. He admitted he could be wrong about everything.”
“Rough.”
“My dad said this German guy set Mendel up. Guy wanted him to fail. Wanted him to understand you can’t predict shit.”
Cain's Blood: A Novel Page 17