Dead Lemons
Page 13
I don’t know if it’s just me wanting it to be true, but this is starting to sound an awful lot like Sean Zoyl. How’s Father Ress getting all this from only finding a pubic bone?
“He likes routine and habit, and will actively seek out jobs and hobbies that are highly repetitive in nature and he will—circumstances permitting—stay in one place in the same manner as far as possible. So the same house, the same car, the same room, and so on. In his early childhood and teens, he will certainly have been involved or attempted to become involved in activities that allowed some form of subjugation. Either with animals or other children. But something that put him in a position of power over other living things. From puberty onwards he will have spent long periods alone, most likely finding ways to disappear completely, and will either lie or refuse to tell people where he goes. He’s not a sadist, but he has some sadistic tendencies—where the natural, healthy instincts of aggression and sexuality have become fused in the psyche—but only to a degree. Hence he gains sexual gratification from taking and holding and hurting Alice. But he notably also still retains a measure of actual empathy and emotional connection with her. It’s not just about hurting, but about hurting her. He forms a relationship with her that to him is intensely personal, is intimate. This makes hurting her carry more weight. Getting to know how uniquely she responds to pain and how she’s different than other people. It’s this empathy that allows the extended period of six weeks between her abduction and the first finding. A sadist would have grown bored within hours and would have needed to rapidly escalate the abuse in order to keep gaining any sexual stimulation, to the point of needing to finally kill Alice quite soon,” Father Ress concludes in what I can’t help thinking is an inappropriately upbeat tone.
“The only other point I would add is that it is certain that Alice was not his first victim. Just considering the simple timings and logistics involved, firstly in taking and transporting Alice without detection, and secondly in safely housing her for this period of time, implies a significant amount of planning and premeditation,” he continues.
“Although his is abnormal, it is still just sexuality. And it developed during puberty, just like everyone else’s. So as usual—just like ours—first there were impulses and experimentation, then daydreaming and fantasies, and then attempts to seek out partners and do things for real. And at every stage the excitement wanes if you don’t progress. Just like with normal sexual development, where at first even just kissing is so thrilling. But once you’ve done a bit of it, you want to do more. And so you steadily progress through the bases until you have full sex for the first time. And even then the goalposts keep shifting out with each new achievement. His sexual development had the same steps. And as we can plainly see from finding something as esoteric as a uterus filled with pig semen, he’s come a long way from those first impulses. What we see in the case of Alice Cotter is a fully developed, matured sexuality,” Father Ress states.
Neither Pruitt nor I have touched our tea.
“Now, assuming that this same person is involved in the killing of your cats and the search of your home, I’d have to say, given the profile, that the motive here would most likely not currently be sexual. The perpetrator would not be gaining any real pleasure from the activities themselves, as they are an order of magnitude less intense than what he has previously committed. And remember, this is still about sex. It would be a bit like going back to passing notes in class and hand holding when you had already gotten used to three-ways and orgies,” Father Finn says with a benign smile.
“Hence, the more likely alternatives as to motive are the following: First, as both of you have suggested, this is simply about self-preservation. The perpetrator believes for some reason that these acts are a requirement, a chore, if you will. He doesn’t like doing it, but accepts that it must be done. To allow him to keep following his real passions. Which most likely he would view as deeply meaningful, something of beauty, and hence will be quite patient and relentless in doing what is needed to allow him to continue.”
Great, I think. Good to know Sean has a good work ethic.
“The second option, which, given the limited evidence available cannot be ruled out, is that this is part of his ritual, maybe even signature. You see, all sexual homicides, because they are sexual, include a drive for repetition. Just like everybody else. If you experience something sexual that feels good, you are going to experience the strong urge to do it again. While one part of sexuality is progression—steadily doing more and more things in different ways, like I’ve mentioned before—another part is also fixation. We fixate or focus on certain things during our sexual development and they become triggers that stay with us the rest of our lives. Like the man who has a thing for large breasts or blonds or who likes blow jobs more than sex. Or the woman who finds men with a good sense of humour extremely attractive. For each of us it is different things, most of them not even physical things. But we all fixate on a few key things that together become our type, basically a combination of things that just gets us going. The process is unconscious and uncontrollable. We can’t choose what we like, and neither can the perpetrator. And we all will, given the opportunity and inclination, try to seek out our types over and over again. With me so far?” Father Ress asks.
We both nod but say nothing.
“And to get to our type, we learn over time what works and what doesn’t. We stop doing the things that don’t pay off. Like pulling girls’ hair. And we do more of the things that do pay off. Like telling girls they are pretty. We all learn our own bag of tricks. This is our ritual. It’s unique to each of us. It’s the things we do, consciously and unconsciously, to get to our type. Think of ritual as somewhere between flirting and foreplay,” Father Ress says.
“But here is where the perpetrator and us normal sexual folk part ways. You see, in normal people, ritual isn’t individual, it’s social. Both you and your potential partners build ritual together. And it’s a learning process that you both are constantly changing as you figure out what works and what doesn’t—essentially, finding out what gets both of you laid. And sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn’t.
“But the ritual of perpetrators differ in two important ways: One, it’s not social for them, only individual. They don’t go around flirting with potential partners, shyly asking over coffee whether the girl would like to be raped, killed, and eaten. They build the ritual alone. So whatever worked for them in the past, like say, hitting a girl over the head and throwing her in the back of the van, will automatically become something they will want to repeat. Because, in their terms, it got them laid. Second, on a neurochemical level, the sexuality and aggression responses of the perpetrator have become fused together. It means they are using different parts of the brain together. And while a lot of our sexual behaviour is under our control, much less of our aggressive behaviours are. Like pre-loaded software on your computer, your brain comes with in-built instincts and automatic behaviours you have from birth. They are rigid, specific, and very hard to change because your brain will actually do them without asking you if you want to or not. Like involuntarily yelling out when someone startles you or jerking your hand away from a hot stove. This also impacts the perpetrator’s ritual. Not only is he building it alone, making it much less open to change—because his partners have no say in whether they like it or not. He’s also building that ritual in a part of the brain that will make it very hard to change anything once it’s in there.
“The effect of all this is that most perpetrators have extremely strong rituals built around very specific types. They feel consistent, strong urges to go after very specific partners and to do so in very specific ways. These ways are defined almost completely by what worked well and what he has liked in the past. And so we have repetition across various crimes. Jeffrey Dahmer liked young men, whom he invited to watch pornography at his apartment where he would drug, then strangle them and then have sex with the corpses. His ritual would often sta
rt weeks and months before the crime when he went out to meet new partners, always to the same places, asking the same questions and so on.
“Adrian Lim always had unknown young children brought to his house by his two female assistants. They then subdued the victim while he raped them and afterwards they killed them together. Always in that order. It was postulated that his entire ritual took no more than a few hours.
“John Gacy always chose people he knew personally. Some believed his ritual required several months to years to be completed. He tied them up in the same way and then tortured, raped, and killed them. And immediately buried the bodies under his house.” Father Ress finishes and then looks at me pointedly.
And I wish I didn’t, but I already know where this is going.
“So what you’re saying is that one possibility is that he’s doing all this just to keep himself safe from being found out, in which case he’ll be merely relentless and persistent until he gets his way. The other is that he’s doing this because it’s part of his ritual and I’m his type, in which case he’s relentless and persistent and I become another fond memory in his dating life,” I say.
Why did I ever stop drinking?
“There is also a third possibility. And again, given the limited evidence, we can’t discount or prefer any possibility above another; and that is that the first crime involving Alice was intentionally staged. It is possible that the pubic bone and uterus with the pig semen did not form part of any ritual or type—that they didn’t give anyone sexual gratification. But that these elements were intentionally added to make it appear as if the crime was a ritual sexual homicide when in fact it was not. These things would then only be attempts to hide the true motive. And in most cases—if it’s not sex, then it’s either money or power,” Father Ress says.
“But why go through all that—he didn’t even have to risk leaving anything behind six weeks later. They could have just done nothing and Alice would still just be a missing person. Leaving that bone there only made the story bigger,” Pruitt points out.
“I said it was a possibility we can’t discount due to lack of evidence. I didn’t say it was likely. And as you correctly point out, Pruitt, it seems an illogical thing to do if the goal is to obscure the motive and by extension, the identity of the perpetrator. And this becomes even more unlikely if we factor in the things that also recently happened to Finn. This is a cold case. Nobody is looking anymore. If you wanted to obscure the motive of the original crime now, the same as back then, you would have been better served not doing anything at all. No, I’d have to say, unfortunately, in my estimation, it is most likely going to turn out to be one of the first two possibilities,” Father Ress says.
Thanks, Father, I think. I really don’t like how he chose to use the future tense in that sentence.
“And you still think the same about it as you did then, about the Zoyls?” Pruitt asks, and there’s a gentle weariness in his voice I hadn’t heard before.
Father Ress takes a sip of his tea before carefully placing the cup on the saucer before answering with sad smile, “Yes, Pruitt, I’m afraid that I do.”
Then turning to me, Father Ress continues, “You see, Finn, I can’t in any way, based on the available evidence, say that the Zoyls are responsible. It simply is not there in the facts.”
“But you were down there, you must have heard the stories. You interviewed them yourself, didn’t you?” I ask.
“Oh, I didn’t say they are innocent, Finn, just that we couldn’t find them guilty. In my opinion, all three of the Zoyl brothers, and several of the now departed elders in the Zoyl family, for that matter, posed a significant risk to the community,” says Father Ress.
“I interviewed them for several hours over more than a week. Sean Zoyl in particular presented as something well on the other side of psychopathy. In fact, the more we delved into the family’s past, the more concerned we became. But none of that matters because we had—still have—no proof,” Father Ress states shaking his head.
“I’ve taken the liberty and called some of my old contacts in the force to check on the investigation this morning after Pruitt called me,” Father Ress continues. “I had a hunch something new must have cropped up. And I’m afraid you’ll not get any further than this with the police. It’s the same problem now as back then. We think we know, but we can’t prove it. And unless more comes to light, this is where it will stay.”
More coming to light, like them finding my bones, I think.
“Is this why you quit it, Bobby?” asks Pruitt, and I see Father Ress smile again.
“Nobody’s called me Bobby in years, you know. And yes, this one was part of it, but only part. I had worked the South my whole career. When I left I had 42 cold cases. All of them bad. Most of them where I knew who but couldn’t prove it. And people talk about seeing all the faces of the dead victims years afterwards, but for me that wasn’t the worst part—it was seeing the smiling faces of the living perpetrators still out and about every day, on the streets, running into them in shops or while they were picking up their kids at school. So in the end, I think I chose to do something with my life where I could know and didn’t have to prove it,” he says with a little laugh.
“It’s really not like the movies and books make it out to be. Crime is easy, and policing is hard. It’s not portrayed that way by the media or the politicians because we want people to feel safe, but truthfully, we never catch the good ones. It’s like hunters in the animal world. We only really ever manage to catch the weak and the slow in the pack, never the best or strongest—they get away. We only catch a small part of the whole, and they will have almost always made it easy for us.
They’re mentally retarded, or too high on drugs, or they’re so crazy or bored that they actually try to get caught. And when we manage to snag one we trumpet it around as a case of master detective work because we need to have something to show so we can get our budget from the taxpayers next year. The good ones, they don’t leave real evidence behind. It’s possible that we don’t even know how many are out there. They are mature and patient, and they don’t make silly mistakes or take dumb risks. They are reasonable, practical people who are hardworking and, very much like the rest of us, just want to make the best of things, achieve happiness by having a good, long life doing what they love.”
“You make them sound just like normal people, it almost makes it worse somehow,” I say.
“Well, as disturbing as it may sound, most of them are. We like to think psychopaths and psychotics and child molesters are all inhuman monsters that have only been acting like they are like us normal people on the outside to blend in, but that’s just not true. The vast majority of them live normal lives. They get married, they love their kids, they have mortgages, they laugh at the same jokes you do. They think puppies are cute. Their motives for doing things are mostly the same as anyone’s—in their own way, they’re trying be happy, to find meaning and to make sense of their place in the world,” Father Ress says as he holds up his hands and shrugs with raised eyebrows.
Maybe that’s also part of why Detective Bobby Ress became Father Ress, I think.
Maybe knowing all these things about people made you need God to stay sane.
CHAPTER 24
June 4, PRESENT DAY . . .
Egosyntonic, I remember, thinking back to what Father Ress had said about what was done to Alice—when you feel good about the things you do and want to keep doing them. There must be an opposite of that—when you feel really bad about the things you do and don’t want to do them anymore.
That’s mostly me, I think.
But not today.
Despite all the pain and fear, I’m definitely happy about what I’ve done today thus far, and I’m pretty cool with what I’m planning to do next. Egosyntonic all over.
That’s leaving out the having gotten caught and likely to get killed soon parts of the day, of course.
I’m feeling a lot better physically, too.
I’m happy to report that most of the pain has consequently receded from ridiculous to merely severe.
But it’s easy to ignore because of the heaviness inside me that started to weigh down when I heard the Zoyls come back.
I know now that I’m not going to get a chance to do anything better with my life, and there’s a lump in the back of my throat that won’t go away.
No more time after this. No chance to make amends, to make better the things that I had made worse.
No more love or hope.
Looks like I’m not even going to get Alice and James out of here. But I’ll not be staying alone, I think, as I swallow it all down again and focus on what needs to be done.
The view that greets me is much as I expected—it’s a pretty flat, grass-covered stretch to the side of the farmhouse and outbuildings, maybe about 400 or so paces of even ground. My car is just out of sight but not far.
While it would be comparatively easy to drag myself over, this is no longer my plan.
The Zoyls are now my plan.
They have to be, really, as I’m out of chances.
I know they’ve seen my car. I know they’re armed and they’re already looking for me.
They’re going to find Darrell soon and see my blood trail, and then they’ll come looking.
And the Zoyls are clever.
They’ll be careful, they won’t rush. They may even figure out that Darrell was shot and that I’m armed. So they won’t be coming from where I expect.
It won’t be an easy shooting gallery where the Zoyls come running at me from the front and we blast away at each other. No, they’ll want to take me alive. They’ll come at me from somewhere unexpected and try to disarm me first. Because they don’t want me dead, they want me to suffer.