“May I take the coat off now?” Pope asked.
Frank’s eyes were adjusting to dark. He could see Pope’s face clearly now. “Be my guest, Doc.”
The older man shrugged off the raincoat and peeled the scarf off his head. He carefully draped them across the back of a padded seat. “I assume there’s a point to taking me here? Some sort of symbolism?”
“What did you do to me?” Frank asked very softly.
There was a pause as the doctor very calmly fixed his gaze on Frank. “I didn’t do anything to you, Frank. I don’t know what you’re referring to.”
“Who killed my brother?”
“You did.”
“That’s a lie.”
“Whatever you say, Frank,” the doctor said. “Whatever you say.”
Frank raised the Colt higher, aiming it at Pope’s face. A little more serious now. “I could no more easily kill my brother than kill myself.”
“If you shoot me, Frank, that’s exactly what you’d be doing—killing yourself.”
“Why? Are you me?”
“No.”
“You never answered my question about the videotape.”
“What about it?”
Frank burned his gaze into those hound dog eyes. “You knew about the reference to God’s work.”
“Yes, and I told you—”
“You knew about it because you saw it, you saw the tape before I did.”
“Whatever you say, Frank.”
“Or maybe you saw me make it. Maybe you were there when I made the tape.”
“Now you’re really grasping—”
“What did you do to me, Doc?”
“Not a thing, Frank. I didn’t do a thing to you. Everything that’s happening to you, you’re doing to yourself. Or should I say, your brain chemistry is doing it to you.”
Frank thumbed the hammer back with a loud CLICK! “Did you kill my brother?”
Pope stared calmly, unblinkingly down the barrel of the Diamondback. “Listen to me, Frank. You’re having a psychotic episode. And I can help you—”
Frank lunged at him, pressing the barrel against the bridge of his nose. “DID YOU KILL MY BROTHER?!”
A sudden noise from above: a rush of feathery, screechy sounds.
Frank glanced up at a flock of pigeons, roused out of their nest by the commotion. The birds poured out of a chandelier, flapping and fluttering up into a column of sickly daylight, then shot out a gaping maw in the ceiling as puffs of ancient plaster sifted down through the shaft of light.
When Frank looked back at Pope, the psychiatrist was smiling. “You need some sleep, Frank,” he said with his yellow grin, his droopy eyes glinting.
Frank looked at him. “What?!”
Pope repeated the words, the litany: “You need some sleep, Frank.”
An echo of whispers gusting through the empty theater like an ill wind—I warned you, I warned you, I warned you, I warned you, I warned you.
“What are you doing?!—those phrases!” Frank demanded, squeezing the grip tighter.
“Look at the time,” the doctor went on, a weird light in his eyes.
Whispers swirled through Frank’s brain, and he winced, and he struggled against the tide. He looked at doctor, pressing the gun barrel harder against the old man’s skull. “You keep repeating those phrases!—like mantras or mnemonic devices!—what are they?!”
“You should be in bed, Frank,” Pope said with a grin, locking gazes with Frank.
Frank felt the first tremor travel up his spine as though a nerve ending had been strummed. His hand felt cold on the grip of the gun, and his arm felt heavy, and the tremors shot across his shoulder blade and down his arm. A wave of whispers crashed inside his brain.
“What are you doing?!” he said, his voice sticking in his throat, his esophagus seizing up. “I’ll—I’ll blow the back of your head off!—I’ll—!!”
The doctor grinned calmly at him. “It’s way past your bedtime.”
The next wave of current shuddered through him like a fist, and his jaw violently snapped shut, and his back arched—his eyes welling up so badly he could hardly see—and all this happened in the space of an instant. Frank struggled to keep the gun aimed at Pope, but Frank’s right hand had the palsy now, and the gun was trembling.
The theater was dimming as though some horrible show was about to begin. Near the front, a single pigeon tossed and flapped against the projection screen, confused by the noise and movement.
“You know what happens to little boys when they stay up past their bedtime?” the doctor asked.
The gun slipped out of Frank’s hand and clattered to the floor.
Electricity blazed through Frank’s body, and he stood there for a moment, completely paralyzed now, shivering convulsively, his jaw frozen shut like a puppet being shaken by a petulant child.
Then he fell to his knees, his body engulfed in sub-zero cold.
“The sleep police find you,” Pope said, enunciating his words as though they were poison darts. “And they take you away forever and ever.”
Frank flopped to the floor like a fish on a hook, the cold current flooding through him, making his nerve endings shriek, encasing his body in ice. He couldn’t even scream. It was as though his jaw was wired shut all of a sudden, and all he could do was lie there in a jumble of tics and chills, staring up at the psychiatrist.
Pope sighed, glancing around the deserted theater, then glancing down at Frank. “For a long time I wondered about you, Frank,” Pope said. “I wondered how long it would take you to put it all together.”
Terror howled in Frank’s brain.
Pope was towering over him, the doctor’s stooped form silhouetted in the gloom. His face was haloed by a nimbus of light. “You’re a good cop, Frank. You deserve an explanation.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
It all starts with a complex tapestry of events, like all of God’s work.
On that fateful day fifteen summers ago, he awakens early—before the sun. He’s been waking early for months. The lithium does little to ease his pain anymore. The practitioners call it manic-depression. Bi-polar. But he knows it is merely training for his larger purpose. Like the Benedictine monks of the seventeenth century. His brain is his cloister.
That morning, he prepares for the march carefully. He wears modest clothing—Sansabelt slacks, golf shirt. He has a light breakfast. He has prepared placards, pro-life slogans on cardboard signs, and he stacks them carefully in the rear of the Suburban van.
He takes the highway downtown, listening to hymns. His experience as a policeman helps him function in the urban ghetto, his skills as a therapist help him deal with people on the edge. The clinic is on the southwest side, on the border of an industrial district. It is a shell-shocked place, ravaged with crime and poverty. He parks several blocks north of the clinic, then walks the rest of the way over broken glass and urine, like Job walking into the whirlwind.
By the time he arrives at the clinic, there are other marchers already picketing the cursed place. He joins them, comrades in arm, allies in the holy war against the heretics who would kill babies. It is a blazing hot day, and he sweats profusely as he marches, his anti-abortion sign raised high. Within hours, he is exhausted. Drenched in sweat, voice hoarse from shouting righteous chants.
And that’s when he encounters his destiny.
She is coming out of the clinic with a backpack: a young girl—couldn’t be more than twenty, young enough to be his daughter—with a sheepish expression on her face. And all at once, he knows. He knows what she has done—even in the midst of the protest. She has murdered her own child. Drawn and quartered its tiny limbs. Sucked it into a toilet.
And yet. And yet.
This young mother, who is hurrying down the sidewalk, trying to avoid the shouts and feverish gazes of the protesters, seems so innocent, so young, so impressionable. The sun is dappling her blonde hair with a soft, luminous halo, and he takes this as a sign.
T
his woman is his destiny.
“Sister!” he cries out in his most charitable, benevolent voice. “God forgives you!”
She is approaching him, an intense, pinched expression on her face. He gets a closer look at her. Her midriff is bare, her top stretched across loose-hanging breasts. Her hair is bottle-blonde, and she has tattoos on her upper arms, and her face has a certain hardness to it. “Why don’t you leave me alone?” she says as she passes.
“I can help you,” he says to her.
She pauses, chewing gum, her eyes caked with dark makeup. It’s becoming clear that this girl is no college student. She’s a working girl, maybe a prostitute. “How the hell are you going to help me?” she says, her eyes flaring with contempt.
“I can help you understand what you’ve done,” he says, and he means it with all sincerity. He can show her the studies, the biological reality. The fully formed nervous system of a fetus. The horrors of abortion. And he can ease her guilt by helping her find God, helping her find a truer path down which to lead her life.
“What?!—what did you say?!” she hisses at him with a glowering look.
“What you’ve done,” he says. “You should know how it feels. To an innocent, unborn child.”
She stares at him for a moment, aghast, like a soldier stumbling upon an atrocity of war. Then the rage and the self-loathing takes over, and her expression tightens into a mask of hate.
She takes a step closer and spits at him.
The glob of mucous and saliva hits him in the eye, and the sheer surprise of it jerks him back with a start. His foot catches the edge of the curb, and he tumbles backward to the pavement. He lands hard on his posterior, and the pain shoots up his spine. A few gasps rise up from the other protesters, a smattering of nervous laughter.
The girl is still standing there, staring at him. “Fuck you,” she says.
Then she walks away.
He watches her, the center of his chest like a block of ice. The others help him to his feet, and he keeps watching her as she vanishes around the edge of the building.
He wipes the spittle off his face. The cold is spreading through him, down his arms, into his fingertips. He feels like an ice sculpture.
Something deep inside him clicks suddenly like a switch being thrown.
“Henry? Are you all right?”
The voice is a fellow protester standing next to him, sounding as though it were underwater, coming from a great distance. His mind is rearranging itself, his molecules realigning. The cold is turning to heat. The heat turning to energy. The energy turning to purpose. The revelation galvanizing him.
“Henry?”
He turns away from the picket line and starts across the street toward his RV. There is much to do. He has been asleep all these years. The harlot has opened his eyes. The girl is indeed his destiny.
There is so much to do.
He will demonstrate to these women—these wretched whores—what it’s like to be an innocent child of God and be snuffed out by a metal probe, or be torn apart by forceps, or be flushed by suction. He will show them what it’s like to be an unborn child and have your life ripped out, without anesthesia, without warning, without reason.
He will make them feel what it’s like.
He will make them know the consequences of their actions.
Starting tonight.
The psychiatrist paused.
His story had taken less than ten minutes, but it had pierced Frank like a grappling hook through his brain. In the gloom of the empty theater, lying on the sticky floor, his pulse pounding, his body stiff and inert, Frank had absorbed each word as though it were a bullet.
“And that brings me to you, Frank,” Henry Pope said then, pacing through the shaft of jaundiced light beaming down from the ruined ceiling.
The doctor’s voice had a dull echo to it, as though it were rattling around in Frank’s head, and every subsequent echo sank deeper into Frank’s subconscious, reminding him just how close a homicide detective can be to the truth of a case, and never connect the pieces. Motive and opportunity.
Of course, of course.
Frank had seen patterns in Pope’s background, but hadn’t recognized the link. The connection to children through pediatrics, the right-wing politics, the troubled history with women. Henry Pope had turned his medical training, and his skills as a policeman and a social worker, into a horrifying modus operandi of Old Testament vengeance. The signature of an angry God.
The thumb suckers had nothing to do with sleep.
The victims were posed as babies, molded in the image of the unborn children they had aborted. Frank knew the truth now, the fragmented memories of coroner reports and victim histories streaming through his mind. The victims all shared a history of multiple abortions. They were the ideal examples upon which Pope could fulfill his spiritual mission: surgical eviscerations emulating abortions, and the horrible tranquility of those cold, dead thumbs inserted between livid, blue lips.
For one brief instant, Frank’s mind conjured terrifying Technicolor glimpses of the doctor hunting down candidates late at night from the comfort of his Lincoln Town Car, consulting medical records from welfare clinics on strippers and high-priced escorts, moving through the shadowy world of sex clubs under the guise of a social worker ministering to the unwashed. And the ultimate surgical precision of each murder, the use of pentobarbital, the subtle misdirection of the strangulation wounds, not to mention the elaborate process of planting evidence.
Pope was the thumb sucker killer, and he had found his perfect patsy in Frank Janus.
“I must say,” the doctor mused aloud, his voice echoing across empty shadows. “I was always a little taken aback that you never figured out the fetal position. Something a good detective would tap into immediately.”
Frank managed to sit up, leaning back against a broken theater seat. His body was limp. His nerve endings felt as though they had been scoured. He took a shallow breath and managed to say, “How did you do it? Hypnosis?”
Pope was on a roll, pacing along the ramshackle rows of chairs, pontificating in the darkness. Pigeons rustled somewhere off in the shadows of the theater. “All those poor, sweet, innocent babies,” he said, gesturing expansively. “It’s the invisible holocaust, Frank. Can’t you see the need for atonement?”
Frank saw his .38 lying under a chair less than ten feet away. “What did you do to me?” he asked softly.
“Frank, I know it’s painful, losing your brother like that, but if you had any idea what kind of pain these innocent children go through.”
The gun lay within Frank’s grasp, if he could just make the lunge across the aisle. “I asked you a question,” he said, wiping his eyes.
“There were others, Frank.” The doctor paused then, looking down at Frank slumped on the floor. “Other Jane Does in other districts. I was able to do my work for quite a while, and watch the blotters chalk them up as cold cases that would never be solved. Forgotten women, Frank. Society’s invisible cast-offs. Then there was the one from the Nineteenth District, the stripper, the one I left under Wacker Drive. That was one of your first cases, Frank, and you blew it. You came to see me, and you were spooked, and I filed that away.”
“Are you going to answer my question?” Frank said, glancing at the gun under the chair, summoning all his strength. If he could just get to it before Pope did any more hocus-pocus.
“I’m getting to that, Frank” the doctor said. “Believe me. It all goes back to that first case. You wouldn’t quit digging. And then it hit me. You could be my insurance policy. With that horrendous childhood, all that emotional baggage, all those delusions and phobias, all that stuff tied up in knots inside you. I started working on you. Just in case. I started slipping things in when you weren’t looking.”
“I’m not going to ask you again,” Frank said in a measured voice, his body coiled like a spring, ready to explode.
The gun was lying there, waiting for him.
Across the
theater, a flock of pigeons were flapping against the screen.
“You’ve heard of Punch and Judy, Frank?” the psychiatrist said.
Frank sprang to his feet suddenly and went for the gun.
And time seemed to freeze.
CHAPTER THIRTY
The Diamondback is a single-action model revolver commonly carried in Condition Two, which means the chamber is full, but the hammer is depressed, so the best position for a shooter under pressure is the “tripod” posture, with means legs are slightly bent, elbows are locked, the left hand is steadying the bottom of the grip, the right hand is around the grip with the index finger on the trigger and the thumb on the hammer so that the hammer can be cocked in one, easy, reflexive movement—
—and that’s exactly what Frank did as he lurched across the aisle suddenly, snatching the gun out from under the seat and slamming into an adjacent chair, sending dust and moths into the air.
Somehow he managed to get both hands around the Colt, and he scrambled back to his feet, the fundamental lessons he had learned in the academy spinning through his brain. He managed to face the doctor, aiming the gun as best he could with his blurred vision, trembling hands, and wobbly knees.
“WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME!?!” he thundered one last time, his voice sending the pigeons into a frenzy, bouncing off the walls, dive-bombing the screen.
The doctor just stared calmly at the gun. “Ask the sleep police, Frank.”
Frank pulled the trigger—
—except his finger would not depress the tiny rubber-coated lever. It would not fire the gun. It would not budge. It was as if the gun had jammed, but the gun had not jammed, the gun was fine, the gun was well-oiled and in fine working order, and Frank knew instantly that it was not his gun, but his finger that had jammed—
—or, more precisely, it was his brain that had seized up, refusing to send the proper signal to his finger.
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