By Reason of Insanity

by Shane Stevens

  “Why California?”

  “It’s a start.” He pulled at his earlobe. “Since the killings began there, I’m hoping our mad genius is a native or at least lived there as a child. With such a list we can see how many are dead or in mental institutions and maybe narrow it down.”

  “Anything I can do?”

  “Plenty. You can get that WATS line in here fast. Starting tomorrow, I want to be on the phone. And another desk for the researchers or yourself when you’re down here. You can work up a list of the top brass in the police department for me. Also the mayor’s office, with phone numbers for everybody. I’ll need a dictaphone machine and a telephone recorder. Tell them to hook up the recorder to the junction box with the adapter set so it works when I pick up the receiver. I also need a small safe in here, one with a double combination lock. And I’m still waiting for several lists from John Perrone.”

  Grimes jotted some things down on the back of an envelope.

  “I’ll do what I can,” he said cheerfully.

  Outside, the rain blanketed the windows as the storm took hold of the beleaguered city. Somewhere north of New York lightning downed three heavy-duty transmission lines, and a man in Con Edison’s energy-control center quickly blacked out a dozen Westchester communities and cut voltage in the city by 8 percent. In the office the light dulled a bit but neither man noticed it as each busily pursued his own thoughts. After a while Grimes inhaled deeply and stood up.

  “There’s one fatal flaw in your theory.”

  His voice jarred Kenton from deep concentration. “Only one?” he asked with a smile.

  “One that’s important, anyway.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “He killed his mother when he was a kid. Now he’s a man and he’s killing again. But what happened to him all those years in between? How come he wasn’t killing all along, if he’s locked into his childhood as you claim?” He shook his head. “Something’s wrong there. Where was he for those years and what was he doing?”

  Adam Kenton walked over to the window. “I don’t know,” he said softly, watching the ribbons of rainwater rolling down the smooth glass surface. “Not yet anyway.”

  He stared at his reflection, clearly visible against the black background.

  “What you said about the child and the man, It reminded me of the time they found Jesus preaching in the temple after three days away from home. I think he was twelve at the time. When they questioned him the boy said, ‘I must be about my father’s business.’ Or words to that effect.”

  He turned around, his face solemn.

  “The funny thing is, you don’t hear about him again either until he’s a man.”

  Twelve

  AMOS FINCH felt guilty and he didn’t like the feeling one bit. Not at all. Guilt was a middle-class aberration that had no business being in his psychological system. It was cheap sentimentality wrapped in emotional tinsel. It was pedestrian and bourgeois and counterproductive. Even worse, it was irritating. There simply was no excuse for allowing common standards of morality to cloud his fine perceptions. None whatsoever. He was not middle class, he didn’t subscribe to its beliefs or accept its judgments. Nor did he intend to be governed by an obsolete set of values that proscribed selfish conduct. Selfishness kept the race going, and he was one of the superior breed that rose above mere moral considerations. No, he had nothing to do with guilt that came from looking out for one’s own interests regardless of the suffering of others. He had no neurotic excesses. He was coldly analytical and detached.

  But in truth Amos Finch was feeling guilty.

  For three days he had known how to tell if Vincent Mungo was alive or dead. Or at least, if Mungo had really escaped from Willows State Hospital some three and a half months earlier. And for three days he had said nothing to anyone. A hundred times he had found himself at the phone about to call John Spanner in Hillside, and each time he had stopped.

  When he analyzed his motives it all seemed eminently reasonable. He was watching a genius at work, an artist in action. Whoever the California Creeper really was just didn’t seem to matter anymore. Identity and past life were meaningless now. Only the present meant anything. And what it meant was that he, Amos Finch, was witness to the emergence of a truly monumental mass murderer. A killer of incalculable guile, one perhaps destined to rank with Jack the Ripper and Bruno Lüdke. And perhaps even to surpass Lüdke’s record of eighty-six women victims, if only left alone.

  That was the rub.

  For the sake of society, such a monster had to be captured or destroyed. Species survival demanded it. A defective organ must be removed for the good of the body. A defective individual must be removed for the good of the group. Vincent Mungo was defective. He was killing his own kind. He was cancerous.

  He was also a genius and an artist and the most exciting thing to come along in Finch’s lifetime of studying mass murderers. He could be, should be, must be the crowning achievement of that life! He would be the subject of a definitive study, itself a work of genius and art. Written of course by the world’s leading scholar on multiple murderers. The book’s title? The Complete …

  That’s when the guilt feelings began.

  Finch wasn’t going to give up his killer so easily. By now he had a vested interest in him, a proprietary interest that had become almost a mania. Each morning he listened to the news to hear if another victim had been added. Each evening he worked on his preliminary notes of the case, intending to include it in his courses at Berkeley the following semester. In between he collected everything he found printed about Vincent Mungo. He had his students looking too. No mention was too slight, no publication too obscure. He ran classified ads in several Bay area newspapers as well as in the Los Angeles Times, offering to pay for any item having to do with the celebrated killer, no matter how indirectly. He was undoubtedly the first to see Mungo as a collectible. While the primary purpose was scholarship, the monetary value was a definite consideration. He knew, for example, that personal items of, say, Jack the Ripper would be worth a fortune to interested collectors. He intended to become the foremost collector of the new Jack Ripper. Scholarship would be served and a fortune made. He wanted it all, anything and everything. And when he had everything, he wanted more.

  The longer his collectible remained free the more celebrated he would become. And the more valuable, both in terms of the artifacts of his existence and the need for a definitive study of that life. Assuming he would continue his kills, of course. Finch had no doubt about that. His man seemed to be programmed for killing, as though it were a reflex action, involuntary, unable to control or prevent.

  Sooner or later the end would come; Finch knew that and accepted it. He did not expect the man to stop suddenly, to go into retirement or die providentially. Yet the scholar in him, the scientific mind, wanted that end to be stretched out as far as possible. He saw it much as an experiment in the laboratory, where the knowledge gained was cumulative. In that sense there was no cutoff point, no time when the learning process was enough, the knowledge sufficient.

  Only this wasn’t the laboratory, nor were the madman’s actions a controlled experiment. Decency demanded an end to such monstrous activity. Instinct demanded it too. And so did society.

  Amos Finch was caught in a classic dilemma of science. One going back to Dr. Frankenstein and beyond.

  Some weeks earlier he had settled in his mind that Vincent Mungo was not the killer being sought. With the growing notoriety, more and more had come to be written about Mungo until most of the facts of his life were known. When these were compared to the deeds of Jack Ripper, it was obvious to Finch that they were two different men. As far as he could tell, Mungo had virtually none of the qualifications needed to perform such deeds. Not the drive or the skill, much less the level of intelligence and imagination. He was a simple clod who existed, like most people, on the lowest rungs of function and achievement. To consider him equal to the genius at large was an artistic sacrilege.


  Which left only two possibilities. Jack Ripper was either Vincent Mungo’s partner on the night of the escape from Willows or he was someone totally unknown who started his murderous career after the escape and took Mungo’s name as a cover. If it was indeed Mungo’s companion who was found at Willows, then Jack Ripper was unknown. And Vincent Mungo among the missing. But if it was Mungo’s body on that sodden earth, its face bludgeoned beyond recognition, then the maniacal killer was almost certainly the other man. Thomas Bishop.

  Finch knew how to tell which one it was.

  Maybe.

  It all depended on a single anatomical feature.

  If he could prove that the madman was not Vincent Mungo but very probably Thomas Bishop, the police would immediately circulate Bishop’s picture and description nationwide. After that it would be only a matter of time before he was caught or killed. The only reason authorities had been unsuccessful so far was that they were looking for the wrong man.

  The scholar in Finch didn’t want that.

  His instincts as a man fought his drive as a student of aberrant human behavior. At that moment he was too closely involved to notice his own aberrant behavior in not notifying officials immediately.

  On Monday morning he had figured out a possible solution to the problem first raised by John Spanner. It had come, as he knew it would, after weeks of being worked out in those layers of mind beneath consciousness, where riddles are unraveled without direct thought. But he hadn’t gone to the phone; he needed time to think. Then Monday evening brought him the news of the young woman found murdered on a train in New York.

  Which was about the time he first noticed that irritating feeling.

  Tuesday was mostly spent vacillating between the phone and his work. In the evening he learned of the second woman killed in New York, again apparently by his star subject. The irritation increased, and by Wednesday he found himself defending his position aloud. Which might have seemed perfectly reasonable except for the fact that he was alone in his study.

  Amos Finch did not normally talk to himself aloud. Any manifestation of indecision was repugnant to him. If anything, his view of life leaned toward the overly simplistic: things came up, decisions were made, life went on. Indecision and vacillation were products of a lesser mind, as seen mostly in women and other domestic pets. That he should now be subjected to them irritated him still further.

  That evening he went out to dinner with a young female friend. Deciding that talking to a woman was preferable to talking to oneself, he explained his problem to her, in hypothetical terms of course. She was flattered to be taken into his confidence; she had never before heard him talk about anything but sex and horse racing. And she understood perfectly. When he had finished his lengthy monologue about a superior man torn between conflicting desires, she smiled sweetly at him and told him that the solution was really very simple. He just had to do his thing.

  She was twenty years old.

  He stared at her and said nothing.

  Later in bed, after he had done his thing, Finch finally came to a conclusion. No matter what the problem, he would never again try to talk intelligently to a woman. Not about important things anyway, or even the unimportant, beyond facts. It just wasn’t worth the effort.

  On Thursday morning he met his ten o’clock class and had difficulty in concentrating on his lecture. In his afternoon class someone mentioned the latest crank artist in a deprecating way and he became annoyed. And highly indignant. Vincent Mungo was the latest and greatest! Yes, that was correct.

  Except for two things.

  He wasn’t the greatest, not yet anyway.

  And he wasn’t Vincent Mungo.

  At home again, he worked on a cipher puzzle for relaxation but he knew what he had to do. The decision had been made.

  Bon Dieu!

  What he hated most about guilt feelings was that they made one feel so damn—_guilty_.

  He called the Hillside police department and caught John Spanner as he was leaving. Spanner listened with growing excitement as Finch explained what should be done to determine the identity of the Willows body. Although out of the chase, the lieutenant had retained a keen interest in the Mungo affair and silently regarded it as his one supreme failure. Yet in the back of his mind a suspicion continued to lurk that he had been somehow close to the truth.

  Now he would hopefully have a chance to prove it one way or the other. With luck. With a great deal of good luck.

  He promised Amos Finch that he would look into it immediately and that he would call back when he had anything definite to report.

  In minutes he was out of police headquarters and on his way.

  DEREK LAVERY heard about it Monday afternoon. John Perrone had personally called to tell him that Vincent Mungo was apparently in New York. A woman’s butchered body had been found on a train coming in from Chicago. It was Mungo’s work.

  Lavery was impressed by the news. Mungo had made it clear across the country. With his face known everywhere, leaving a bloody wake, he had still somehow managed three thousand miles. And he was supposed to be a mental case!

  The Los Angeles bureau chief was also impressed by something else. John Perrone didn’t usually phone him with a bit of interesting news; normally it was Christian Porter or even one of the several assistant managing editors. Lavery suspected it had something to do with the recall of Adam Kenton. That made two of them in New York—Adam Kenton and Vincent Mungo. And both on the same day. Which was quite a coincidence.

  A cover story, thought Lavery. They wanted Kenton for a cover story. But a major one this time, the full treatment. Mungo was big news now and swiftly getting bigger. With the right hype he could become a national sensation. And he, Derek Lavery, had started it all with his story on Caryl Chessman and then the two on Mungo. Kenton had done most of the investigative work on all three, with strong help from Ding, so he was the logical choice for New York. Besides being the best they had on the magazine, except for himself and Ding of course. But he and Ding were a team, indivisible, and geared for stories with a wider scope. Adam Kenton was a loner and perfect for an in-depth look at Vincent Mungo. They were basically the same type anyway.

  In truth he had been relieved when Mungo left California and the western states. He liked things done in a professional way, that is, everything kept at a distance. Never anything personal. Yet Mungo had made it personal by sending the letters, especially that one with the female … part.

  That was unforgivable in Lavery’s view. While it made for a good story, it necessarily involved him in the grubby details of direct police contact and it demoralized his mail room. Worst of all, it put him in a position of having to react to others instead of acting out of his own autocratic view and unquestioned authority. He had suddenly felt impotent.

  He enjoyed being the captain of the ship and directing his vast energies outward from his Barclay Lounger. His enormous penthouse office was his captain’s quarters, and he didn’t like being drawn down into the boiler room. It unnerved him. He was a mover, a shaker, a leader of men. When he gave an order it was obeyed. But if he had to involve himself with petty details and people’s emotions, then all his power was gone.

  Without power, who was he?

  By Thursday, Derek Lavery had almost forgotten about a homicidal maniac named Vincent Mungo. He had been given another reporter from the Chicago bureau to replace Kenton, and he was nursing along a number of stories, including a second one on the insanity-defense issue, which Ding was putting together. As far as Lavery was concerned, Mungo was John Perrone’s New York headache now. His and Adam Kenton’s.

  And right where they all belonged.

  He told his secretary to make a dinner reservation at the Yacht Club. Over the weekend he intended to go sailing.

  AT ABOUT the time that Derek Lavery’s secretary called the Yacht Club, John Spanner was slamming the brakes to a screeching stop in front of the Hillside hospital. A minute later he was in the morgue records room checkin
g the file on Thomas Bishop, DOA from Willows State on July 4, 1973. His fingers shook as he pulled the pictures of the body from the folder. There it was, impossible to miss. The body supposedly of Thomas Bishop. Whoever he had been, he was circumcised.

  From the tiny morgue office next to the lockers, Spanner called Sheriff Oates in Forest City and asked him to get to Vincent Mungo’s family in Stockton and find out if Mungo had been circumcised. Yes, that’s right. Circumcised. No, no joke. Try to get the information as soon as possible. At police headquarters. Or later at home. Right. That’s the idea.

  He did not tell the sheriff why he wanted to know such a thing, and Oates did not ask.

  Next he called Willows and spoke with the new director, a Dr. Mason. He identified himself as the police official originally in charge of the murder investigation several months earlier. If the doctor would be kind enough to have someone check Thomas Bishop’s file for a physical description. Specifically, if Bishop had been circumcised. Developments in the case necessitated that information. He realized that such things might not normally be in a file, but Thomas Bishop had been there for most of his young life and a complete description could be part of his record.

  Dr. Mason promised to attend to it immediately and return the call. Hillside police headquarters? Yes, of course. Just as soon as it was received.

  Spanner drove back to his office filled with dread.

  Something would go wrong.

  But nothing could go wrong.

  If Bishop’s file at Willows didn’t have the answer, then he’d get it from the hospital record at birth. And if that didn’t work out he’d find another way. Maybe some of the attendants or inmates had noticed Bishop in the shower, maybe he had a homosexual relationship with one or more of them. Or perhaps some relative somewhere remembered. Damn it, there had to be a way.

  Twenty minutes later Dr. Mason was on the phone to report no mention of a circumcision in Thomas Bishop’s physical-description data. But the doctor warned that it should not be taken to mean he was not circumcised, only that there was no mention one way or the other.