by David Wiltse
Becker's self-help group could only meet in prison, where he had personally put many of them. Or in a cemetery, where he had put even more. It was after planting his first victim underground that Becker had discovered what he had in common with the men he hunted. He was, he felt, the same as they, except that he had a license to hunt. His victims were loathed by society and he was applauded, but in Becker's mind he was merely performing a kind of socially accepted cannibalism.
The big fish in the pond eating all the smaller ones, he thought with self-disgust.
But there was something else that set him apart from his fellows, of course, besides his FBI badge and official position, and it was the cause of his pain. Unlike them, Becker wanted desperately to stop. He did not believe that an actual cure was possible; he would always be who he was in the deepest recesses of his, soul, and no amount of therapy had convinced him otherwise, but he was convinced that by an exercise of sheer will he could alter his behavior. He could stop.
And he had done so although it took a resignation for the Bureau to accomplish it. They had not accepted his resignation, delegating him instead to a status known in bureaucratese as "inderterminate medical extension," which meant that they could reach out for him when they needed to and not worry about him otherwise. For his part, he was not obliged to respond when they called. But they knew he would. A ferret did not refuse to go down a hole. It was what he had been bred to do. It was where it lived.
At the library the next morning Becker settled in front of the now familiar microfilm screen and quickly located the date and page of the message. Once again the story was at the bottom of the page, nothing more than a bit of filler taken from the AP wire. A second body had been found in the same mine in Hendricks, West Virginia. Another young woman who had been missing for months.
Her remains had been found as a result of the discovery of the body of the first young woman, and officials indicated that they would continue to search the mine.
There was even less information than there had been with the first body, but less was needed. One woman somehow gotten lost and died from exposure.
Not two. Not in different shafts of the tunnel. The second girl had been reported missing three months after the first.
He found something that works, Becker thought. The killer had discovered a method that he liked, a means of abduction, a means of disposal. Why wouldn't he repeat himself If it works, use it.
Serial killers always stumbled a bit at first, learning by trial and error what worked best for them. The first attempts were usually clumsy and less than perfectly satisfying, reliant more upon dumb luck than careful planning.
Many of them were caught in the beginnings of their careers because they didn't know what they were doing yet, they made crucial mistakes before refining their methods.
But those who survived the early times learned quickly and soon mastered their grisly craft.
This one had begun his mastery, Becker realized. The newspaper was two years old, the girls' bodies had not been discovered for three years.
The cave could be stuffed with corpses. Becker could be receiving documentary evidence from his correspondent for weeks-but he knew he would not. His correspondent had said "i know why" this time. He knew who and he knew why and he was eager to tell Becker or he wouldn't take the risk of the coded messages.
Becker took an atlas of the United States from the library shelf and opened it on a table. Decatur, Alabama, was a long way from Hendricks, West Virginia. More than four hundred miles by road. Not that distance made much difference. The letters were arriving years after the fact. A beast could slither a thousand miles in that length of time. And of course he would have had to abandon the coal mine as soon as the first body was found. He would have located a new hole.long since. Another hole in the ground crammed with the decaying remains of someone's daughter.
You do have another hole, don't you, you son of a bitch, Becker thought.
No reason to give up, not while you're enjoying yourself, not while your heart is pumping fast enough to leap through your chest when you do whatever it is you do to them. Only now you've got a witness, don't you.
Someone close to you who knows what you're up to and is almost too scared to stop you. Almost.
For the first time Becker perceived his correspondent not asanother scum dweller trying to entice him into the swamp, but as a friend. A decent human being who knew what he saw and hated it and wanted to stop it.
Despite risk to himself, he was signaling Becker from afar, alerting him to the existence of a man-eater.
Using the length from his fingertip to the first knuckle for a measure, Becker approximated a radius of 30 miles and drew an imaginary circle with Decatur as the center.
He started to write down the names of the towns within the circle but stopped when he noticed Springville. There was no need to look further.
Springville was the location of the Alabama state prison.
Becker leaned back in the chair and studied the ceiling for a moment.
Behind the information desk, June Atchinson watched with interest.
Write again, my friend, Becker thought. Prison is a big place, help me find you. Help me find him.
Aural could sing a lick, too, damned if she couldn't, voice like a Southern angel, just enough twang to put everyone in the audience at ease. She didn't have what could be called a strong voice, but the Reverend Tommy R. Walker's Apostolic Revival didn't require an Ethel Merman.
They had microphones for power, all Aural had to do was hit the notes in that sweet, breathy soprano and electricity would take care of the volume. In Aural's case, it even seemed that less was better. If she was hard to hear, the audience would just lean forward and listen all the harder, like hummingbirds straining for that last taste of nectar.
No one ever strained to hear Rae, that was for sure; they didn't care.
The Reverend Tommy might have been amazed at Aural's command over the audience, at how easily she slipped into Rae's role and delivered an audience to him not only primed but panting for more spiritual uplift if it looked and sounded anything like Aural. It might have astounded him how quickly and easily Aural understood what the business was all about and how to work the crowd until they were so lathered up with a zest for redemption at Tommy's sweaty hands that they fought their way to the front, clashing crutches and all. Even more importantand most becoming in a woman, Tommy thought-was her grasp of the financial side of religious labor. They opened their wallets wider when Aural was around, no question about it-and what kind of a pissant peckerwood back-country farmer could refuse to give generously when the angel Aural was holding the plate, especially now that Tommy had her wearing the black-and-crimson robe during the offering. Might as well plead poverty to Gabriel, whatever the hell he looked like. Archangel or not, he sure didn't have anything over Aural in the looks department, except maybe the wings.
And, as if anything else were needed, she didn't cost much, All she asked for was a widow's mite to live on, and since she lived in one of the trailers with all the rest of the show, that was a mighty small mite at that. The Reverend Tommy could not have been happier-well, there was one little thing that troubled him, but he planned to take care of that soon enough if he could just find the opportunity without Rae sulking around in the background.
But if Tommy was amazed at Aural's skills with an audience, she herself was only mildly surprised at how quickly it had all come back to her after a hiatus of a decade or more. Her father had been a straight evangelist, content to merely get the sinners to their knees, crying tears of relief and redemption, and not striving for actual medical marvels, but the process was much the same. And it was still a rinky-dink operation, doomed to the smallest of communities and remotest of backwaters by the lack of charisma of the man in charge. Her father had never been very good at it, an assessment Aural reached in her early teens, and neither was the Reverend Tommy R. Walker. He could dream of going national on satellite televisio
n, but it was a dream he was having for himself; Aural wasn't joining in. There was more to religious healing than prolific sweating and a loud voice, and the sad part was that the Rev didn't know what it was.
"Funny name, Aural," Rae said after Aural had been with the show a week.
Rae had already been eased off the stage and Tommy had relegated her to befriending the audience as they filtered in for the show. Rae didn't mind giving up her spot on the stage, she had never been comfortable doing it in the first place, but she did mind being shoved to the back of Tommy's attentions offstage, and that was clearly what was happening whether the new girl was aware of it or not. And of course she had to be aware it-she was a woman, after all.
"I've heard of 'Oral' like in Oral Roberts, of course," Rae continued.
"But 'Aural' is a new one."
"It's my own," Aural said. "My given name was Aura Lee, like in the song," she said, pronouncing it as one word, Auralee. "I really liked it, so I just kept the part I did like."
Rae smiled. Aural knew the woman was trying to be friendly. They always tried to be friendly when their men were attracted to her, and Aural was always willing to be friends back, but it never worked out in the long run. The men always got in the way and the women ended up hating her even when she had not wanted the men.
Sometimes, she thought, it was because she had not wanted their men.
Most of the time her friendships with other women had been brief and frustratingly truncated.
She could still laugh easily with them and share secrets immediately in the way that women have, but Aural had found in general that it was easier for her to get along with men. At least, with them, she had no unrealistic expectations. Even when they pretended that they just wanted to be friends, Aural knew better. There was something comfortable about the predictability of men, and they were so much easier to manipulate.
Women used their brains too much. Aural had never known another woman who wasn't always trying to figure out how to get what it was she wanted from a man while making him believe it was his idea. Men, in Aural's experience, didn't think with their brains at all, and they sure as hell didn't waste any of their TV time pondering the nature of their relationships. Aural flat-out knew she was smarter than any man she was ever going to meet.
"With all your talent," Rae was continuing, "I'm surprised you didn't ever go into show business. You sing just as good as some of the girls you hear in Nashville."
"Why, thank you, that's sweet," said Aural. "I did think of a career like that one time-when I was younger.
My daddy was particularly excited about it… 'Course my daddy tended to get excited. He was a man who enjoyed enthusiasms. He was fixin' to bring some agents and record people and such to come take a look at me."
"My goodness. How exciting."
"Well, I guess so. I was only sixteen at the time so I just sort of took it for granted-you know, the way kids do. " "Darling, you can't be but two years past sixteen now, Rae said with less than perfect honesty.
"Bless you," said Aural with equal candor. "But I'm way past those teenage years, and thank goodness, too. It seemed to me I was so horny I just itched. Didn't you feel like that, just itching all over and dying to find some young buck to scratch you?"
"I never thought of it quite that way," said Rae demurely. She placed her hand at her throat as if to ward off such thoughts.
"Oh, I did. 'Course the thing about that is it's never very hard to find a man who's willing to help you out.
Fact, it's nearly impossible to find one who ain't."
Rae remained silent. Her experience had not been the same at all.
Platonic friendships seemed to be what men offered her most. Aural continued volubly and Rae realized the young woman had reached a topic that interested her.
"I realize now that at that age a lot of that was just plain old curiosity, you know. I mean, I just flat wanted to know what this sex business was all about. People make a mistake keeping it a secret from little kids, don't you think? That just makes it a mystery, and everybody loves a mystery. Once you've seen a few men with their pants down you realize there ain't going to be no real surprises, they're all pretty much alike except for those who are worse, but by then I guess it's too late to worry about the mystery anymore. You've already got the habit."
"I'm sure you're right," Rae said, secretly lamenting the fact that she didn't have enough experience to be certain if Aural's assessment of men was right or not. But it did have an intuitive correctness to it.
"The thing is, I wish I had some other bad habit instead of men. I'd rather chew tobacco if it was up to me, but I guess we don't get to pick our bad habits, do we?"
Rae wondered how Aural managed to keep a complexion as smooth and pink with all of this worldly experience going on. She herself had a tendency to spot up whenever she needed to look nice, and stress of even the mildest sort caused cold sores on her lip.
"What happened with the record people and all?" Rae asked.
"Oh, yeah. Well, Daddy had them all set to come to one of his shows, and I guess they did, but the night before that I ran off with Earl Hockfuss who was this boy with the cutest strand of hair that fell across his forehead in a certain way that made you just want to cry or scream or grab hold of something soft and squeeze real tight.
When Earl would reach up and push that hair away, I used to tighten up my butt and press my thighs together, you know what I mean, Rae? 'Course, I was only sixteen, remember. I must have thought hair made the man in those days. Probably from hearing Daddy preach about Samson and Delilah or something." Aural laughed. "I was given to easy impressions back then."
"You ran off and got married?"
"No, honey, I just ran off. Earl and me went to a motel in Black Ridge and stayed there for three days until Earl decided he was too sore to continue."
"My goodness."
"I know. But it was educational. At least it was for me.
If old Earl learned anything in them three days, he never let on, except maybe who was the stronger sex when it came to sex. But I learned a lot, most of it disappointing."
Aural grinned in a way that made Rae feel that she ought to blush. "But not all of it, honey. Not all of it."
"What did your daddy do when you ran off?"
"I don't know. I ain't seen him since. He prayed, I imagine, then looked around for someone to beat up on.
That's how I know he missed me. I wasn't there for him to beat up on."
"But he was a minister," Rae said.
"Hon," Aural said, touching Rae's arm. "Hon."
The Reverend Tommy R. Walker found himself alone in his trailer with Aural, a blessing to be savored and consumed. The Apostolics were striking the tent and Rae had taken herself off to town to buy groceries, which usually took quite a while because Rae was an ardent coupon clipper and comparison shopper. Rae could turn a half hour in the supermarket into a half-day excursion, and for once, Tommy R. was grateful for it.
Aural was looking exceptionally good. She had dropped the beatific pose that worked so well onstage, and was showing excitement and agitation.
Tommy assumed it was about him until he realized she was asking for more money.
"You know I'm worth it," she said. "You've doubled your receipts since I been in the show."
"Now… doubled…" Tommy hated money discussions-with employees. It was enough to dampen a man's ardor.
"Easy. I can judge a collection plate good as you, and they just keep getting fuller, don't they? You don't suppose it's because your miracles are getting better, do you?"
"That's why they come, missy. To see the power of the Lord revealed through my hands."
"Them people had glue in their pockets before I showed up. I seen you work alone, remember?"
"That was a bad night. That happens."
"It ain't happened lately, though, has it?"
"Lookit here," said Tommy. "It's not like you wasn't appreciated. Didn't I put your picture on the post
er right next to mine?"
"Right under yours."
"Under, over, alongside, what difference does it make?
I'm making you a star, honey, you ought to be grateful.
You got your beautiful face on every telephone pole and shop window in Pikeville."
"I didn't ask to have my picture on no poster. What I'm asking for is a cut of the cash."
"The Apostolics don't get a cut, and they been with me five years, give or take a member. Rae's been with me seven, she don't get a cut."
"I'm not studying Rae. I assume you got your own deal with her."
Tommy rose and crossed the trailer in three steps to stand beside her.
"I got one deal with Rae that could easy be yours," he said, looking down at her. She was such a little thing, once you stood next to her. It was just her pep that made her seem bigger. Tommy greatly admired pep.
As long as it was properly channeled.
"Let's stick to business," she said.
The Reverend Tommy put his arms around her. He was no giant, but she barely came up to his chest. It made a man want to protect her.
"This could be business, if you want to look at it that way," Tommy said. She turned so that her back was to him, but she didn't push him away.
"What kind of business you call this?"
Tommy pressed his groin against her back. His arms slid round her waist.
"The best kind," he said, his voice growing husky.
"I'm talking about money, Reverend. I didn't come in here for no salami."
"That's all part of the service," Tommy said. He thought he felt her push back against him, thought she wiggled her ass just a little bit for him. "I offer salvation and salami at no extra charge."