The Serialist

by David Gordon

  He admits to being evil and immediately mobilizes his extremely powerful mind to demolish the moral system that makes him evil, but he never for a moment questions his own sanity. What he can’t see is that madness can be rational, organized, systematic, even brilliant. Insanity can make perfect sense, as for example in paranoia, a closed system that admits no outside reality or objective truth: anyone who doubts me is part of the conspiracy, hence I can never be talked out of my beliefs. Similarly, Clay might be hyperintelligent, and I don’t doubt that his IQ is higher than mine, but nevertheless there is this crack, this fundamental derangement, that prevents him from doing what I, for example, manage however humbly to do: actually write something. As a writer, Clay produced only those few letters and nothing else. As an artist, he created a handful of horrifying photographs and a bunch of other very ordinary ones.

  Not that writers and artists can’t be nuts. We all know that. Perhaps most of them are, to some extent. Art is an inherently cockeyed enterprise. But the part that writes is, I believe, the sane part, the part that strives to rescue the world from oblivion, life from death, by getting it all down on paper. And what is that wish to save everything and bring everyone along with us, good and bad together? What is that but love? And those of us who write genre books, with our detectives and killers, our vampires and aliens—perhaps this is why we return to the same story again and again, like children clutching a favorite, jelly-stained book: to retell the tale over until it’s finally right; to keep adding new rooms to the house we built for our thoughts to live in, returning each morning with a fresh armful of sadness from the haunted woods; creating that doll-chain of pages, that endlessly forking tree, that toy city of books inhabited by ghosts, that obsession in the shape of a story, the series.

  By the time we hit the city, I’d exhausted myself with these thoughts. As the train slid through the back alleys and tunnels, I found my mind slipping, back in time, to childhood. Not mine, Clay’s. Half-consciously, I turned to the page where he’d told me about his origin, his first kill. The gerbil. Hamster. Whatever. It bothered me in a way that I couldn’t place. That frantic wheel kept spinning in my head, going nowhere. Those little bones snapping like pretzels between my teeth. I woke up with a headache in Penn Station, one of my sweaty hands gripping the other.

  I changed for the subway, and when we broke ground and emerged across the river, it was dark out and I had a message on my phone. It was Jane. She and the husband had been talking. They’d very much like to publish an excerpt of my Clay book in the next issue of The Torn Plaid Coat, maybe even make it the centerpiece of a special issue on crime, organize a reading, a party, the works. And although it sounded like I had a great manager already, they’d mentioned my book to their own agents and editors and they were eager to see it too. Weren’t we all?

  The prospect of going home to my lonely couch and my haunted apartment filled me with dread, and when I saw Morris still sweeping up his shop, I ran to bang on the window. He let me in but declined my desperate plea to buy him a drink.

  “No offense, but drinking with you and those straight people is a bad influence on me,” he said. “Anyway, I have plans with Gary. And no, you can’t come. But here, this might cheer you up.”

  He handed me a bunch of beautiful irises.

  “It’s my new project. Home-grown. I raised and planted them right in my backyard.” He handed them over with a smile.

  “Genius . . . ,” I mumbled.

  “Really?”

  “Genius.” I grabbed him and, standing on tiptoes, I kissed him on both cheeks.

  “You’re welcome,” he shouted, as I ran out, waving my purple bouquet. Rushing down the sidewalk toward home, I got my phone out and called Townes. He was gone for the day.

  “It’s urgent. An emergency. I mean it.”

  They dithered but put me through and at last he got on the line. A TV droned in the background and I heard dinner sounds, silverware and plates and clinking glass.

  “Yeah, what?”

  “Townes,” I yelled, as if trying to reach him without a phone. “I got it. I know where he buried the heads.”

  76

  As soon as we got off the phone, Townes dispatched units to secure the area, and by dawn the digging had begun. Agent Terence and another man picked me up, and after a quick run to Dunkin’ Donuts, we arrived to find the street blocked off by cop cars parked sideways, their red lights rotating in silence. Vans and more black government Impalas filled the street, and a backhoe was idling nearby. Big lights flooded the house and yard, throwing the woods into stark relief. The chaos had woken the neighbors, who came out to watch, lining up on their porches and driveways, as if the circus had come to town and decided to set up across the street. As the cops waved us through, I saw the young mother from my last visit, standing beside her Volvo, staring at the run-down house across the street, the one she always knew was haunted. Now she would learn by whom.

  We parked and got out. There was a predawn chill in the air. Agents in black coats, uniformed cops and forensics people in white paper space suits all gathered around our car, grabbing coffees, mixing milk and sugar from the pile we laid on the hood, and rooting in the giant box of doughnuts, which was warmed by the still-cooking engine.

  The door to the house opened and Townes appeared, lured perhaps by the smell of coffee. He nodded to me but spoke to his agents first, muttering in low tones, then came over as they dispersed.

  “I’ve been talking to the foster mother, Gretchen,” he said, pulling a coffee from the cardboard carrier and lifting the plastic top. Steam spilled up.

  “Yeah?”

  He flapped two sugar packs and poured them into his coffee, then added two creams. He took a long sip, sucking the hot coffee over the rim, and put the top back on. He sighed.

  “She’s barely coherent, but yes, Clay came around now and again, to visit and look in on her. Helped with the mortgage sometimes too.”

  “That’s suspicious,” I said, “considering that he hated her guts.”

  “Yeah, and that her ex-boyfriend got arrested for child abuse.”

  “Where’s he?”

  “Dead from lung cancer fifteen years ago.”

  “You think she knew what Clay was up to?”

  He shrugged. “Probably not. We’re taking her in for a full interrogation, but I figure it’s more like she didn’t want to know. Easier to just drink her gin and watch The Price Is Right.” He glanced at me. “And keep the blinds down when Clay said he was going to work in the yard.”

  “What? She said that?”

  “Yeah. Helping out around the yard.”

  “But it wouldn’t be the yard, I don’t think. The woods. That’s where he said they buried the gerbil or whatever. That’s the spot he photographed. That’s his place.”

  “Yeah. I know. Come see.”

  As we made our way between the vehicles, another agent rushed up and whispered to Townes, gesturing toward the steadily growing crowd behind the tape. Reluctantly, the gawkers parted as some cops escorted a small party to the front. It was the families: Mr. Hicks, the Jarrels, and John Toner, all blinking and gazing around them as if suddenly woken from a deep sleep.

  “Just a sec,” Townes said. He took a big gulp of coffee and went over. He held each of their hands in turn, giving the men a firm pump, Mrs. Jarrel a kindly squeeze. They huddled around him, and as they whispered together, one by one they stole a glance at me. Mr. Jarrel blinked blankly, with the same fish-eyed stare as before. Hicks nodded and I nodded back. Mrs. Jarrel stared right at me and then smiled, sweetly, and lifted her fingers in a little wave. I smiled and waved back, with an unaccountable feeling of gratitude. Toner alone avoided my gaze, as if out of embarrassment after our last encounter. He focused on Townes and kept jotting in a small notebook, until his cell rang and he turned away to answer. Townes returned, nodding to me, and as I followed him across the street, I saw Dani, on the other side of the crowd, standing alone. I raised my hand in a w
ave, but she didn’t acknowledge me. She remained completely still, as if seeing right through my skin.

  “Come on,” Townes said. “This way.”

  We trooped through the gate, and once again I passed the overgrown bushes, the rotting Buick, the shuttered, sinking house, all of it now swarming with people in blue windbreakers and surgical gloves, poking, wiping, peering at who knows what. In the backyard, a section of the fallen fence had been removed and another strip of red tape was strung across it. A cop nodded and lifted it for us as we stepped through.

  The woods were still dark. Light was entering slowly, shifting sideways through the trees or falling from above, where it was split and filtered by the leaves. It touched one shadow at a time, revealing it in turn as a branch, a stone, a shining face, a hand. The technicians who were digging still had their flashlights and helmet lamps burning. They moved and worked as if attached to the earth by these beams, which they switched off one by one, as the air grew brighter. They’d marked off the woods and the small meadow with tape in a kind of grid, with little flags waving and numbered plastic stakes. The air around us buzzed with static and constant radio chatter.

  After that, nothing happened. We waited. The sun rose and it was full day. I took off my jacket. Agents kept coming up to whisper with Townes, and his radio and cell kept buzzing, causing him, each time, to stick a finger in one ear and yell into the device, but mostly he just stood there like me. He finished his coffee and looked for a place to throw the cup. Finally he gave it to an agent passing by with a plastic bag full of excavated dirt. After another hour he looked at me and shrugged.

  “What do you think?”

  I shrugged back. “I don’t know.” I hesitated, looking around, and then lowered my voice. “Listen, I have to pee.”

  He frowned. “Can’t you hold it?”

  “I’d rather not.” In fact I’d had to go since I arrived, but there was no chance of ducking behind a tree without stumbling over the FBI.

  Townes sighed. “I guess go in the house,” he said. “We can’t have any accidents.”

  “Ha. Ha. Is she there?”

  “Who, the foster mom? No. She’s downtown.”

  “OK. I’ll be right back.”

  “Yeah. Take your time.”

  I walked back the way we’d come, carefully stepping around the marked ground, and went through the fence into the yard. If this property had once had the childish aura of a ghost house, then like most scary places it now seemed small and sad in the grown-up light of day. Still, the idea of going inside made me slightly nervous, and I hesitated on the rear steps, my hand on the rusty knob. I peeked through a dusty back window to check for the dog.

  Then I heard a commotion in the woods. Nothing too loud, just a general rise in the radio buzz and the movement around the yard, but it was enough for me to know they had found something. I turned and ran back, through the fence, through the trees, to where all the cops and agents were now gathered around like the crowd of curious onlookers who needed to be held back. I elbowed my way forward and found Townes.

  “Townes,” I shouted. He looked over his shoulder and waved me up. The others let me by.

  He was standing over a trench, a few feet deep, in which agents in coveralls and white booties were carefully digging, using brushes and pans and tiny knives, as if they were treasure hunters excavating an ancient ruin.

  “You found something?” I asked. He just pointed at the ground. They’d struck gold. A tooth and an earring. Both were crusted with dirt and lying on a white cloth while photographers shot away. You could still see the white root where the tooth had been attached to the jaw. The earring was a thin, dangling fan of yellow lace.

  “Can’t say yet about the tooth, of course,” Townes told me. “But that earring. I know the description better than my wife’s engagement ring. It belonged to Janet Hicks.”

  They kept working, inch by inch, while we all stood watching, and half an hour later, they found the first head. It emerged slowly. At first someone noticed just a few thin hairs. Carefully, they combed them out, separating each strand from the dirt. Then came the top of a skull, a cracked white dome, like a dinosaur egg sleeping under the ground. A heavyset man, wearing thick glasses in black frames and looking comical in his white feetsy pajamas and shower cap, knelt down and brushed it off with a sable paintbrush. With a dental tool he dug around it. He leaned over and blew. Five minutes later, the skull was clear up to the eyes, the empty sockets peeking at us over the soil. Something gleamed.

  “Here’s that other earring,” he said. He leaned back and let the cameras whirl, then went on, brushing off the cheekbones, cleaning the hole that was once her nose.

  “Over here,” called a woman who was crouched a few feet away. Until then, I’d thought she was a man. She looked as shapeless as her colleague in a matching white space suit, white booties, white hair bag and goggles. But when she pulled off the goggles and looked up at Townes, I realized she was really a small freckled girl in her twenties. “Another skull,” she said.

  Over the next hour, they unearthed three human skulls in all. They were buried in a triangular formation, surrounding the skeleton of what the experts insisted was a guinea pig, not a gerbil or hamster, and a cat as well.

  “Did Clay mention a cat?” Townes asked me. We stood side by side, staring.

  “No.”

  “Maybe he forgot. He’s got a lot of bodies to remember.”

  “No. He doesn’t forget.”

  “No,” he agreed. It was something to say. We were all just standing and looking at the three heads. Once these were people, with faces, and behind the faces, thoughts. Now they were empty, like broken china, cracked bowls out of which the brains and blood had flowed, with holes that had seen or smelled or breathed. Three jawbones grinned at us, about to laugh. One, with a few gold molars, belonged to Nancy Jarrel, Townes guessed. He knew the dental records by heart. One had what, despite the dirt and cracking, must have once been a dazzling set of white teeth. Dora Giancarlo. Dani’s twin. Townes said she had had no cavities. Miss Perfect.

  The scene was quiet now. People moved around, spoke in low tones, the cameras whirred. No one said what we were all wondering. Where was the fourth head?

  “Did you go deep enough there?” Townes asked, pointing a few feet away. The heavyset guy in the bunny suit shrugged. “It’s rock under there, sir. No way he could have dug that without dynamite or a jackhammer.”

  Townes nodded, hands in his pockets. Another hour went by, and still three heads stared at us, a meager crop that, having been planted so many years ago, was finally ready for harvest. We’d been waiting all this time, for just this revelation, but now that it was here, the empty sockets and leering mouths offered no answers, only questions. Why us? Why not you? They had no wisdom to offer except the one fact we all know already, the obvious stupid truth: everybody dies. Everyone, they said, ends up like us. Here in the skull orchard, the bone yard, the garbage hole, the vacant lot, the dump.

  77

  Townes went to talk to the families. They were still digging, but he’d more or less given up hope of finding another head that day and the experts were busy bagging the evidence for transport back to the lab. Ahead was the long work of identifying and investigating, reconstructing through forensics as much of the narrative as they could. Townes would need DNA from the relatives, and at least one of the families was also faced with the prospect of finding out that their loved one remained unfound. I saw Dani, still by herself, and told Townes I’d talk to her.

  When I waved her over, the cop at the barricade let her right in, as if I were some kind of deputy, and neither of us could help smiling a little at this, my promotion from contemptible muckraker, to murder suspect, to junior G-man, now that it was all over anyway and didn’t matter.

  “You found them,” she said immediately.

  “They found three. One is missing. They’ll need DNA to tell who. But I think . . .”

  “You think what?�
��

  “Never mind.”

  “What? You can tell me.”

  “It sounds weird, and if I’m wrong it will just make it harder. But I feel like I saw your sister.”

  Dani smiled. She squeezed my hand quickly and let it go. She cleared her throat and I realized, when she spoke, that she was choked up.

  “So what do I do?” she asked. “To give the sample?”

  “They’ll drive you over to the lab. Or you can go down yourself. I can come with you.” I touched her shoulder. “It doesn’t have to be right now.”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I could use a drink of water.”

  “Let’s go in the house.”

  “No. I’m fine. Don’t bother.”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s no bother,” I said, guiding her through the gate. “To be honest, I’m desperate to use the bathroom.”

  We climbed up onto the creaky porch and opened the door. I held it for her, but she shook her head.

  “You first,” she said. “It’s creepy.”

  “It is creepy, right?” I said, walking in. The place was filthy and smelled like dog shit. There were newspapers stacked around a recliner patched with duct tape and a TV tray covered with pill bottles. Someone had been busy dying in here. It was like a tomb. We went into the kitchen. Empty gin bottles were lined up on the drain board, like she was into recycling. A free Chinese restaurant calendar hung from a nail above the sink, still showing April. I rinsed a glass and filled it.

  “Thanks,” she said, frowning, and took a skeptical sip. Just then the little dog padded in and I flinched involuntarily, but he didn’t even bother to bark now.

  “Hey, look,” Dani said, and knelt to pet him. He licked her hand, gave me a dismissive look, and disappeared back into the house. “You know what’s weird?” she asked me.

  “Everything.”

  “Yeah, but in particular. Why wouldn’t Clay bury that head with the others? It’s not like him to be random. If you know what I mean.”