Sam’s whole body felt clammy. What was he supposed to do in this situation? He couldn’t talk Todd down. He didn’t know where the man was, so Sam didn’t think he could stop him.
He needed to call the police. He needed to hang up and—
“Don’t think about hanging up, there, Sam,” said Todd. “If you hang up, I’ll kill her. Of course, I’m going to kill her anyway, but whether you call the authorities or not isn’t going to make a damned bit of difference. So, you might as well stay on the line and talk to me, huh?”
Sam tried to swallow. He didn’t have enough saliva. “Okay. Okay, what do you want to talk about?”
“I want to talk about Lola. My Lola.”
“Look, why don’t you let Hilary go and meet me someplace, Nick? We’ll go to Lola together. She wants to see you.” Sam needed to buy time. Lola didn’t have any desire to see Nick, as far as he knew, but he had to try something.
Nick laughed. “Oh, Sam. You don’t understand anything about her, do you? I know Lola. I know her inside and out. She doesn’t want to see me. She has you now.”
“Look.” Sam’s voice was a croak. “You’ve got the wrong idea about Lola and me. There’s nothing going on with us. I’m writing about her, that’s all. I don’t even know if I think she’s innocent.”
“Innocent? Of course she’s not innocent. She’s never been innocent. That’s why I’ve always loved her so much. She showed me who I really was. She made me alive. Before I met her, I was floating through life. Everything was dull and boring. But she showed me that life could be sharp. Sharp and red and bright.” Todd sighed.
“Let the girl go.”
“You keep saying that. You think if you say it enough times that I’ll listen to you?”
Sam figured it was worth a try. But he kept quiet this time.
“I’m allowed to play now, Sam. At the right time, I’ll find you both. I’ll kill you. Then I’ll kill Lola. And everything will be so sharp, so bright. But until then, I get to play with whoever I want. And right now, I want Hilary.”
There was a muffled shriek on the other end of the line.
Sam blanched. “Come on, Nick. This isn’t you. You’re a good guy. You’re a loyal friend. Patrick says—”
“Fuck Patrick. He never understood. He never liked Lola. He wasn’t a true friend. Lola was the only true friend I ever had. And she betrayed me. Maybe she wants to make it right now, but she can’t. Nothing can make it right. But Hilary can make it a little better. A little redder.”
“Nick—”
A gunshot interrupted Sam.
Sam hung up the phone.
He dialed 911.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“They found her.” Adam Cross sat down next to Sam in the police station. He handed Sam a styrofoam cup filled with coffee.
“Lola?” said Sam.
“No, Hilary Fells,” said Cross. “She was a college student. She was out running. It seems like Todd stopped, picked her up, and drove her out some back road. Her body was found in the back of a black sedan outside of Shepherdstown.”
“Shepherdstown?” But that was only twenty minutes away from Sam’s house in Harpers Ferry.
“Yeah, it’s close,” said Cross. “He’s in the area. He clearly doesn’t care that he’s being reckless. Not only is he killing again near the area where he first committed the other murders, but he’s close enough to D.C. to be practically in the FBI’s backyard.”
“So, that means you’re going to catch him, right? He’s not only a fugitive now, he’s a public threat.”
“Everyone wants to catch this bastard,” said Cross. “But honestly, the additional murder just makes it muddier. Now, between his calling you in Frederick, calling Lola in Hagerstown, and killing this girl in Shepherdstown, we’ve got three distinct offices in two different states all in on this investigation.”
“But that’s why you’re here. You’re the FBI.”
Cross nodded. “True. His picture’s on the evening news every night. He’s high profile. We’re getting tips constantly. Thus far, none of them are panning out, but one of them will soon. We’re going to get him. We will.” He sighed. “I wonder if we can go back over some of the things he said to you on the phone.”
Sam took a sip of his coffee. It was too hot. He recoiled. “Uh, sure. What do you want to know?”
“Well, tell me again about the brussels sprouts.”
“Uh… he said that murder was delicious. He said he never would have known until he tried it. Like trying brussels sprouts.”
Cross eyed him. “You be straight with me. You swear to Christ you’re not making this up?”
“No.” Sam glared at him. “I’m not. Why don’t you believe me?”
“Because that doesn’t make any sense,” said Cross. “What kind of killer says shit like that? A killer who uses a gun? He’s not fetishizing it. There doesn’t seem to be any sexual assault or sexual motivation. He picked this girl at random. Because he likes killing people? No one kills for that reason.”
“All I know is what he said to me.”
“And he said he was doing it because he liked it.” Cross shook his head. “Hell, I don’t know. The guy’s favorite horror flick was Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Maybe he flipped his lid. Maybe he thinks he’s in a movie.”
“So you believe me now? You don’t think I’m making this up?”
“Well, it’d be a big, twisted thing if you were, Mr. Black. We’ve got a dead body now. I doubt you’re the kind of guy who’d be willing to kill people just for your book.”
“Thank you.”
“Look, he calls you again, you call me.” Cross handed him a card. “Hang up with him and call me right away.”
“What about the number he called me from? Can you trace that?”
“Yeah, we’re on top of it. It’s probably a prepaid cell phone that he ditched, though. But maybe we’ll get lucky. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
* * *
“Well, this was years ago, of course,” said Dr. Theodore Irving. “I haven’t had contact with him since then, and I don’t even work as a prison shrink anymore.”
Sam smiled. “That’s what you called your job?”
Dr. Theodore laughed. “That’s what everyone else called it. I decided it was useless to fight.”
Sam had decided that he needed to find out more about Nicholas Todd. Up until this point, his focus had been Lola, her relative guilt or innocence. But now that Todd was running around free, threatening people and leaving dead bodies in his wake, it was beginning to seem as if Todd was just as important. And Sam didn’t know much about him at all, only what he’d heard from Patrick and his friends and what Lola had told him.
He’d gotten in touch with Dr. Irving, who’d conducted Todd’s psychological profile when Todd had first been arrested. Sam hadn’t expected anything to come from it. But, surprisingly, Dr. Irving was retired and more than willing to talk. He felt that the danger posed by Todd far outweighed any other concerns he might have had.
Now, Sam and Dr. Irving sat in the doctor’s living room, sipping on iced tea that his wife had brought to them.
“At any rate, things might have changed for him rather drastically since then,” said Dr. Irving. “I can only tell you what I thought about him then.”
“Well, you deemed he was sane enough to stand trial.”
“He knew the difference between right and wrong. He knew that murder was an extreme act. That was partly why he was so proud of himself.”
“Proud?”
“He felt as if he’d made the ultimate sacrifice for love. He kept insisting that he’d done it for her. But when I questioned him about the other murders and Lola’s role in that, well, then he didn’t have much to say in defense of himself.”
“What did he say?”
“He said that after killing Lola’s parents, he felt as if he’d been freed. He thought he’d been through a bright, cleansing fire that had purified him in some way. He tho
ught he was somehow more special than other people, that he’d been granted a kind of deep insight.” Dr. Irving took a drink of his iced tea. “That’s actually not uncommon for sociopathic murderers to go through something like that and to claim to see killing in a new light. Charles Manson was rather genius at reprogramming his ‘Family’ into thinking that death was a form of love, and that killing was all part of some kind of transcendent experience. Charles Starkweather also seemed to undergo an awakening after he killed his first victim.”
“So, you think Nicholas Todd is a sociopath.”
“Oh, certainly,” said Dr. Irving. “Rather classic. Sort of typical sociopath, even. He thought of himself as set apart from others. He considered himself superior. In all actuality, he was really rather average. He definitely thought of himself as more intelligent than he actually was. I think for people like that, the first act of killing is possibly the closest they really come to extreme human emotion. Sociopaths, you know, can’t really feel things the way other people do, but they are endlessly fascinated by human emotion. Ultimately, they view emotion as weakness. They tend to despise it. But it’s the kind of hatred that’s borne of frustration, I think. They study emotion. They attempt to mimic it. Often, they’re very good at mimicking it. But they still don’t understand it. But death, especially violent death, there’s so many emotions. For a violent sociopath, it’s the closest they can get to actually feeling those emotions, I think. Inflicting them.”
“I’ve spoken to several of Todd’s friends. They don’t characterize him as a person who lacked empathy.” Sam remembered the story about Nick taking the fall with the principal for the paper airplanes.
“Well, they wouldn’t,” said Dr. Irving. “Like I said, he was probably very good at faking empathy and faking emotion. Lots of people have very intimate relationships with violent sociopaths and have no idea. Think of the stories of women who were married to serial killers, for instance.”
Sam guessed he was right. “So, that’s why you think he killed? Because he was a sociopath?”
“Oh, I don’t know if it’s quite that simple. Lots of people are sociopathic or have sociopathic tendencies and don’t actually commit any kind of violence. It’s possible that murder was not inevitable for Nicholas Todd. Like I said, he was only of average intelligence. He was not exactly inventive. No, I do think the idea for murder may have been planted externally.”
“So, you think Lola put him up to it.”
“Lola is the girl, right?”
“Yeah. At the time of the trial, she denied knowing him, but it seems she was in a relationship with him in actuality. But she claims that she never wanted him to kill her parents.”
“She claims he thought of it on his own?”
“Well, not exactly. She admitted making an offhand, flippant comment to him once, that she and Todd wouldn’t be able to be together until her parents were dead. But she says she didn’t mean it that way.”
Dr. Irving stroked his chin. “Well, that might do it. Although, I can’t really imagine him being motivated by simply wanting to be with this girl. He hardly seemed the sentimental type to me.”
Sam cleared his throat. “Well, when I said ‘be with’ I meant it in the… physical sense.”
“Ah.” Dr. Irving raised his eyebrows. “He was sexually motivated. Yes, that would make sense to me. I could definitely see that setting him off. And then, of course, once he’d committed one act of violence, he was so excited by it that he wanted to commit others. And he became less and less organized, driven by the emotional reaction—emotion by proxy, you understand—that he experienced. Honestly, it’s amazing to me that he waited so long to kill since he got out of jail.”
“Really?” said Sam. “That’s interesting, because I spoke to the FBI agent assigned to Todd’s case, and he said they had a preliminary profile saying he wouldn’t kill again.”
“They’re looking at him the wrong way,” said Dr. Irving. “They’re looking at him like a spree killer. Those kinds of killers generally kill a bunch of people in one isolated incident. But the thing is, it’s hard to say whether or not they’d kill again afterward, because the bulk of them commit suicide once they’re done. Todd had a partner—well, he perceived that he had a partner, anyway—and men who kill with a romantic partner almost never commit suicide.”
“Huh,” said Sam.
“I couldn’t be quite sure why. I think there’s something about a bond with a loved one that gives a man more of a reason to live. It doesn’t seem to be true about platonic partnerships. If you look at the boys from Columbine, they worked together, but they both killed themselves.”
“So, you don’t think Todd is a typical spree killer?”
“It doesn’t seem that way. I’d say he’s a disorganized serial killer. He’s not intelligent enough to cover his tracks, so he’s not trying to get away or keep from getting caught. I’d say he has one thing he wants to accomplish while he’s free from jail. That thing is more important to him than keeping a low profile.”
Sam nodded. “Yeah, he says he wants to kill Lola. And me, since he thinks that I’m a competitor for her feelings or something.”
“Well, the way he’s behaving right now, he’ll probably be captured within days. I doubt you need to worry about his getting the chance to hurt you.”
Sam let out a breath. “I hope you’re right.”
* * *
The playlist was blaring in the background and Sam was lying on the floor of his office.
He’d gotten up this morning to try to put together a preliminary outline for the book. He wanted to organize all the different sections, to figure out how he was going to present the information. Certain interviews would go nicely together in certain sections. Others would be appropriate in other places.
But almost immediately, he got frustrated.
He wasn’t sure how to structure the book.
There were a few options. He could write it chronologically, starting with Lola and Todd’s meeting, moving through the murder, then the trial, then the subsequent years to Lola’s current life. The problem with an approach like that was that he thought that it was a bit anti-climactic. After all, the reason that people were going to pick up this book now was not to know how Lola turned out, but to know, once and for all, whether or not she helped kill her parents. If he structured the book this way, then people would probably stop reading after they found out that answer, which would be right at the beginning.
Another option was to write the book starting with the murder. This sort of mirrored a crime scene investigation. The crime was discovered, and then the investigators gathered evidence and figured out what happened. But that approach worked best when a writer was profiling the investigators, not the murderers or victims.
There was one other idea he had, and that was to try to structure the book around his own investigation, which meant that the story would start with his meeting Lola and would then progress through all the investigation he did. But that would mean he’d have to include Todd’s escape in the book, and everyone had accused him of sensationalizing that. He stubbornly wanted to keep it out of the book so that no one could say that he wanted it to happen.
At any rate, the more he thought about structure, the more he realized that he wasn’t even close to being able to write this book. He still didn’t know what had actually happened.
After talking to Dr. Irving, he’d thought he had enough. Irving had seemed to think that Lola’s flippant promise of sex was enough to incite Todd to murder. After that, it seemed, Todd’s instincts had kicked in. He’d started murdering like crazy.
Sam thought that answered all of the basic questions.
He thought he was ready to try to figure out the book.
But the truth was, there were loose ends everywhere.
He might be able to wave away claims that Lola and her friends played cruel pranks on other girls. Being cruel didn’t make anyone a murderer, after all. He also might be able to c
ompletely ignore accusations that she was a bully, considering the sources there had ample reason to embellish. People liked the idea of being close to the spotlight, even when the spotlight shone on horrible things.
More troubling were the stories of Lola’s aunt and the foster family. Perhaps the aunt could be discredited. She might have been making the whole thing up. But there was something about the actions of Lola with the foster boy that seemed to dovetail with her actions with Todd.
And most of all, there was the confusing suggestion that Lola’s parents had been abusive. If that was true, then Lola had a motive for murder.
He didn’t know if it was true or not, and he wasn’t sure how he could find it out. But he was convinced that was how he needed to start.
Sam got up off the floor. He turned down the music. He paged through his notebook until he found the place he’d scrawled down the number for Ariel Lipton, Lola’s childhood friend.
* * *
“I guess I just want to know more about this bruise,” said Sam. “How’d you see it?”
“Oh, gosh, that was a long time ago,” Ariel said over the phone. “Um, let me think.” She paused. “Well, I think it was at a slumber party?”
“Lola was at a slumber party? I thought she was grounded for life after she made a B on her report card.”
“Oh, that was before,” said Ariel. “They grounded her for grades before Nick. After Nick, they grounded her over that stuff. But I think they let her come because they wanted to encourage her friendships with people her own age.”
“Sounds reasonable to me,” said Sam.
“Yeah, in retrospect, maybe they weren’t terrible parents…” Ariel seemed unsure. “I know she complained about them all the time.”
“She did?”
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