by David Wiltse
“What happened with you and… ”
“Cindi. With an i”
“Cindi.” Karen squirmed in her seat, crossed her legs, looked away from him. She remembered clearly that he was wonderful to talk to when she was willing to be as honest as he was. It was only when she was being evasive or less than candid that it got uncomfortable. Becker had so little tolerance for doing things in a roundabout way. It always made him act as if he knew the joke and was just waiting for her to get to the punchline. It was the way he was acting now.
He was going to make her ask again.
“Are you still together?” she asked.
“The file is out of date?” He sounded amused. “She found it rather difficult to live with me. I’m sure you can sympathize with that.”
“Actually, you and I never really lived together,” Karen said.
“Not actually.”
Karen sighed. “Look, do we have to go into it?”
“Not if you want to avoid it.”
“I don’t want to avoid it… I just don’t want to go into it. It’s very painful, all right?”
“Sorry.” Becker changed the subject. “What are you now, second in command in Kidnapping?”
“How did you know?”
“I read your file.”
“When?”
“Most recently? Six months ago.”
“They let you do that? While you’re on indeterminate?”
Becker laughed. The pilot glanced in their direction.
“They let me do all kinds of things, as long as I don’t ask officially. No one wants Hatcher to find my name on any request memos.”
“Hatcher has nothing to do with Kidnapping,” Karen said.
“I know. He keeps getting kicked upstairs. All he has to do is screw up one more case, blame it on somebody else, and he’ll make Deputy Director of the whole Bureau.”
Karen let the Hatcher discussion die. It would only make her job more difficult if Becker got riled up about his former colleague.
Becker swept all the magazines into a pile and dropped them behind him on the sagging Naugahyde sofa. The sofa frequently doubled as a bed for the owner, and his form was permanently molded into the cushions.
Karen allowed herself to study Becker for the moment that he wasn’t looking at her. He seemed so little changed by the intervening decade since she had seen him last. The unfairness of it almost made her laugh aloud. She was showing every one of her thirty-six years and probably a half dozen more thanks to stress and insufficient sleep. By all appearances Becker, whose internal life she knew to be as tormented as a self-flagellating anchorite’s, seemed impervious to age. The jawline was still as firm, the stomach as flat, the eyes as unwrinkled as ever. There was a bit more gray in the hair, but that only served to add a touch of distinction. It was worse than unfair. She thought he had even improved with age.
“So you’ve been a hermit for all this time?” she asked. “Hermit-or pariah… let’s just say I’ve been living alone and managing well enough.”
“I’m glad to hear it. I mean, that you’re managing well enough.”
“Which is not to be confused with liking it,” Becker said.
“So how often do you look at my file?” she asked.
Becker shrugged. “A couple times a year.”
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Going fishing? Why do you suppose I look at it?”
“I didn’t want to suppose. I wanted to know. That’s why I asked you.”
“What makes you think I’ll tell you?”
“Because I think you’d rather be honest than smart,” she said. “You’re completely without guile when it comes to women, aren’t you?” She touched the back of his hand and he recoiled slightly with an involuntary movement.
“Have you been theorizing about me for the last nine years?”
“It’s been ten years, and it wasn’t a full-time preoccupation.”
“And you concluded from my lack of guile that I’m a block of stone, is that it?”
“On the contrary. I think you’re the most vulnerable man I’ve ever known.”
To her surprise, Becker looked away from her shyly.
After a moment he said, “I’m not going to do it, Karen.”
“Do what?”
“Whatever you’ve come to ask me to do.”
“Okay. I didn’t think you would.”
“I can’t ”
“I understand.”
“I have everything under control now. I want to keep it that way.”
“You no longer feel the urge…”
Becker shook his head. She tried again.
“The compulsion…”
“Desire,” he said.
“… to kill…”
“More like lust than anything else. But stronger. Much stronger
… but it’s gone now. There’s no reason for it to arise in my new life.”
“I understand,” she said.
“I doubt it. The only people around who can really understand are in prison.”
“You put them there,” Karen said.
“Some of them. Some of them I killed.”
“You were always justified,” she said.
“So they tell me.”
“Why don’t you ever take it easy on yourself. John?”
“Because everyone else does, I suppose. Somebody’s got to punish me.”
He grinned, but she knew he was not joking.
“You’re a lot more open about it than you used to be,” she said.
“It’s the AA twelve-step method. First you admit what you are to the group. Problem is, I can’t seem to get a group together. Every time I find somebody with the same problem, he ends up dead. We never seem to have conversations.”
“You didn’t kill Roger Dyce.”
“No.”
“He tried to kill you. You were alone with him, he was armed, he tried to kill you. The man had murdered at least a dozen people, he killed an agent, he was about to kill your friend, the cop…”
“Chief of Police. He’s touchy on the subject. Tee Terhune.”
“You had provocation, you had cause, you had opportunity. Maybe you wanted to, I don’t know.”
“I wanted to. The way an addict wants a fix.”
“But you didn’t. You didn’t. You brought him in.”
“It was a very near thing,” Becker said.
“We knew that. Everyone knew that. But you battled yourself and won.”
“My file must be popular reading.”
“It’s not in your file.”
“But the Bureau knows.”
Karen shrugged. “They know you’ve caught people no one else could find. They know you’ve been in situations no one else would have survived. They know you’re the best hunter in the FBI, with more skill, more courage, more intelligence, more… what should I call it? More ‘understanding’ of the mind of serial killers than anyone in the Bureau.”
“Call it ‘fellow feeling.’”
“I won’t call it that and I don’t see what good it does you to do so. You’ve never done a thing that wasn’t in the line of duty and perfectly justified by the circumstances.”
“Thank you. I feel so much better now. You’ve helped me to see that I’ve been beating up on myself for no reason at all.”
“Gold thinks you’re ready to work again.” Karen said.
“Good of him. The alcoholic is sober so take him out and buy him a beer.”
“He doesn’t see it that way.”
“Possibly because he has his head up his ass. Hard to see things my way from that position.”
“I would think that is your position,” Karen said.
Becker laughed.
“But for me it’s a normal posture.” He touched her hand with one finger, drawing it slowly from wrist to fingertip.
“I’m sorry I jerked away from you a minute ago,” he said. “I’m not used to being touched.”
“You used to b
e very receptive.” she said. She noticed that the pilot and owner had stopped talking. She did not look at them.
“That’s when you were single,” he said. He lightly pinched her ring finger where a wedding band should have been. “Did you take it off just for me, or don’t you wear one for professional reasons?”
“The file is out of date,” she said. “I’ve been divorced for four months and separated for three years before that.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“Not at all. But thanks.”
She pulled her hand from his fingers, glancing toward the pilot. The pilot was staring too innocently out the window. He appeared to be discussing the clouds with the owner.
“I’m really not here to stir up any old flames. John. I’m here to get your help.”
“So tell me about it,” he said.
“About what?”
“The case that was so important you needed a helicopter to find me. That’s an expensive item compared to a phone call.”
“Did you have a phone on the mountain with you? Wish I’d known. Besides. I thought you weren’t going to help me.”
Becker shrugged. “I’ll help you if I can. I’m not going to get involved. If I can do anything useful while I’m sitting here. I’m happy to help.”
Karen placed a folder on the table in front of him. He abruptly put his hand on it.
“Don’t start with pictures of the victims,” he said.
“All right.”
“That was always hard to take.”
“I don’t enjoy it either, but how do you know they’re that kind of pictures? This is kidnapping.”
Becker removed his hand from the folder.
“Kidnapping ends up one of two ways,” he said. “The victim is released or the victim is dead. You didn’t come to see me about victims who have been released.”
“There’s a third alternative,” Karen said. “Sometimes the victims stay missing.”
“Those are kids who are taken by one of the parents in a custody dispute and packed off to a different state. You didn’t come to me for that kind of thing, either.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not where my talents lie.”
Karen nodded. “Okay.”
“And it cost you too much personally to seek me out and talk to me again,” he continued.
“Did it?”
“You may not be as guileless as I am, Karen, but that doesn’t mean that you’re unreadable. Whatever this case is, you felt it was worth the price, which means it means a lot to you.”
“Yes. It means a lot.”
“Save the pictures. I’ll look at them if I have to, but first just tell me about it. Let me get a feel for the case without the emotional load of the pictures.”
Karen blew softly and silently through her lips before starting. “It’s kids,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Some son of a bitch is killing kids.”
Karen was surprised and embarrassed by the sudden flood of emotion. Her voice cracked and her eyes filled with tears. Becker reached out to comfort her, but she pulled back from him and shot her chin up. When she spoke again she sounded angry, but there was no sound of tears in her voice.
“Kids-boys-have been missing from New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts. Connecticut. They’re gone for a time, a month or two-the longest was eleven weeks-and then they are found dead.”
“How many?”
“Six-that we know about. The first that suits the pattern was a nine-year-old boy named Amell Wicker, who disappeared from a shopping mall in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. Eight months later it was a boy from Bethpage, Long Island. Last seen in another shopping mall. His mother let him go for a slice of pizza while she was shopping for shoes. He never came back. They found his body in a garbage bag alongside the highway thirty miles from Bethpage two months later.”
“When was the next one missing?”
“Eight months later. Peabody, Massachusetts. Body discovered six weeks later.”
“How long had he been dead when he was discovered?” Becker asked.
“Less than forty-eight hours. Again it was in a garbage bag, alongside a highway.”
“This one taken from a shopping mall, too?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve checked all the employees to see if any of them worked in more than one of the malls.” It was not a question; Becker knew the answer.
“One employee in common. Peter Steinholz was the manager of a cookie franchise in Upper Saddle River and in Stamford, Connecticut, where the fifth boy was snatched. He’s a family man, wife, two kids.”
“Doesn’t mean anything.”
“No prior arrest record except one DWI three years ago. Reasonable alibi. He checks out pretty clean.”
“Sales reps? Suppliers? Service people? Anybody who might have been at all the malls? The guy who fixes the cookie maker’s ovens, for instance.”
“A few overlaps, six or seven, but the timing is wrong on all of them. You know it wouldn’t be that easy or we would have found him already.”
“I’m just asking out of habit. I know you’ve done all you could or you wouldn’t be here. Tell me about the fourth one.”
“Ricky Stine, Newburgh, New York. Disappeared from a schoolyard during recess. Went out to play with the rest of the kids, never came back. They thought maybe he’d just wandered off, had him listed as a runaway for a couple of weeks until they found his body.”
“Why a runaway?”
“He was hyperactive, always into trouble of some kind. Not a bad kid, just hard to control. His parents said he’d had a history of running away from home, showing up again in a day or two. This time he didn’t show up again.”
“How long was that after the kid from Peabody was found?”
“Ricky went missing six months later.”
Becker nodded. He kept his eyes fixed on the folder as if reading it through the cover.
“Significant?” she asked.
“Not yet. How long till number five?”
Karen looked at her notes. “Four and a half months.”
“He’s getting more frequent. There was an interval of eight months after the first two, then six months, then four and a half.”
“Because he’s getting away with it? More confident?” Becker shot her a glance.
“He’s not thinking about getting away with it, not when he snatches them. Later, when he has to dispose of the body, he might think about details then.”
“What is he thinking about when he snatches them?”
“He’s not thinking at all. He’s feeling.”
“Feeling what?”
“I don’t know yet. I don’t know what he does with them.”
“When I tell you what he does with them, will you know what he’s feeling?”
Becker heard the trace of contempt that Karen could not hide and looked up from the folder. He leaned back in his chair.
“It’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
“Sorry.”
“You don’t approve, but you’ll use it.”
“I didn’t mean anything, John. I know you don’t like it.”
“I don’t know anything everybody else doesn’t know. The only difference between you and me is that you censor it out. You don’t allow yourself to think it, or feel it, and so you tell yourself it’s alien to you. My particular curse is that I can’t censor it out. I know what those bastards are feeling because I can’t keep it out. You can. Inside, you’re just the same as I am.”
Karen shook her head adamantly.
“You don’t accept that about yourself? That you have the capacity to understand even the worst of the bastards if you’d allow yourself?”
“You wanted me to believe this before. I don’t.”
“You won’t.”
“No, John. I don’t. I do not know what they’re feeling when they do the things they do. I don’t mean anything against you, but I just don’t have the capacity.”
; “You don’t want it.”
“You’re right. I don’t want to get into their minds. I don’t want to get into their hearts. I just want to catch them and put them behind bars. That’s all.”
“I’m not suggesting you would ever act on those feelings, Karen. I accept that those who do are different. But having the feelings in the first place…”
“When you see the photos, you’ll know what I mean. I could never empathize with this monster in any way…”
“Empathize is not the same as sympathize. I’m not suggesting you feel sorry for him.”
“I hate him,” she said. She pushed the folder toward him. “Look at them. Look at the pictures and tell me I have anything in common with this beast. Look at them.” She spilled the photos on the table, spread them out with a push without looking at them herself.
Becker winced. The photos were taken in the morgue. He recognized the particular light and clarity, the coldly impersonal attention to detail. It was not as bad as seeing the bodies in person, but it was bad enough.
Becker knew he would have to study the pictures later, but alone, when he could allow himself to feel the complex mix of revulsion and sickened fascination without a witness. The photos were obscene, but he had seen worse. And so had Karen. At this moment the strength of her reaction concerned him as much as the cause of it.
Becker shuffled the photos together and put them back in the folder.
“What were they beaten with?” he asked.
She looked neither at him nor the table.
“A variety of instruments, apparently. Some of them wooden, they left splinters. Some metallic. They found paint chips under the skin. Some were caused by unknown objects.”
“Lumber or wood?”
“What?”
“Were the splinters from processed, finished lumber, or was he using birch switches off of trees.”
“Birch switches? When was the last time anyone used a birch switch for anything? What the hell does a birch look like? Do you think this is some sort of bucolic, romantic operation? The wood was processed, lacquered, chemically preserved, rot-retarded, commercial pine. Birch switches? You’ve been in the mountains a little too long. How can you look at those pictures and ask me if someone beat those kids with a switch?”
Becker sat quietly, waiting for her anger to pass.