The Laughterhouse: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  Still no cops.

  He’s not a monster, and when this is over, people will see that. He’s a man trying to bring balance to the world. What about the next child rapist to be treated and released by Dr. Stanton? What of the next baby killer to be defended by Victoria Brown to be released on the world, their punishment no greater than a slap on the wrist? No, he’s not the monster, they are—they are monsters of this world for defending those people, and they must learn there are consequences for their actions.

  The judge signed off on the entire thing, the judge was happy to sentence James Whitby to no more than two years in a mental hospital and never follow it up. The judge was happy to wash his hands clean of the entire affair, damn the consequences, and move on to the next case. So right now those consequences are going to come back and damn him.

  If the police know him by name, is it possible they know who the rest of his targets are? He is two blocks from the judge’s house when he decides it isn’t just possible, but extremely likely.

  He needs a different car, but he has no idea how to get one. He would hear stories in jail about how to steal one. It sounded difficult. Some would say you had to touch certain wires. Others said you just jam a flathead screwdriver as far as you can into the ignition until you break the lock, turning the screwdriver into a key. Even if he could figure that shit out he doesn’t think his fingers would be nimble enough to do the work. He could always pull a knife on somebody, carjack them, but he can’t see that scenario going well. He sees police chases and people getting hurt needlessly. Like the cop back at Ariel’s house—he could have choked him, or left him to that dog, but he wasn’t to blame for any of this. Cops were the ones that had tried to help him fifteen years ago. Cops were the ones who tried to put James Whitby away two years before that.

  It’s five fifteen and the streetlights come on. He drives around the block and parks one street over outside the same number house as the judge. He sits in the car and watches the evening getting darker. He switches on his phone. Over the weeks since being out of jail, he’s eaten pizza at least every second night. It was his favorite food before being sent away, and he’s been making up for not having a slice in fifteen years. He calls the number from memory and he orders three pizzas along with garlic bread and fries, and says he’ll pay by cash. The person repeats the order back to him, and then he gives the judge’s address. The person tells him it’ll be there within thirty minutes, otherwise his next order will be free. In some movies he’s seen on TV over the last few weeks the police can track a cell phone signal in a matter of a minute; other times they have to use different cell towers in the area to try and triangulate it. Caleb doesn’t know how difficult it really is, but Caleb switches the phone off, not wanting to take the risk, unsure of how the police would have his number anyway. He keeps the blankets over the girls, neither of them show any sign of waking. When Jessica was small and couldn’t sleep, he’d put her in the car and drive around the block over and over until she drifted off, then he’d drive around the block once more for good measure, then slowly pull back into the driveway and sneak her into her room. He would have done that a hundred times over a few years, but they all merge into one memory, one that he smiles at as he climbs out of the car fifteen minutes after making the call.

  It’s a nice neighborhood. Dr. Stanton’s car doesn’t stand out here. Nice homes, nice gardens, probably nice people who would give you the time of day if you asked. It means he has to be more careful. There are still other cars occasionally going by, people coming home from work. Nice people tend to phone the police if they see strange men hanging around their nice neighbors’ nice homes. He looks at every window in view to make sure nobody is watching him, and when there are no other cars in sight, he runs onto the front yard of a two-storey house with large windows with curtains pulled across each of them. There are lights on inside, but there are lights on in all the homes and he has no choice but to try.

  He reaches over the side gate and is able to unlatch it. It opens quietly. He listens for any signs or life, especially a dog, but there is nothing. The backyard has some light on it near the windows, but nothing near the fence line, and that’s where he heads, sticking near the bushes and making his way to the tree in the corner. He steps behind it. Something a few feet away moves through the leaves and he pauses, and even though it’s only a hedgehog or a cat, there is a moment, a brief moment, when he thinks a flashlight is going to light him up before a police baton knocks him down.

  The hedgehog scurries off. Caleb scales the fence. He can see down the side of the neighbor’s yard and out into the street and the judge’s house is one house down on the opposite side of the road. Not a bad guess. He stays on the fence and waits. It’s dark outside and the temperature has dropped. He balances himself so he can rub his hands. Two minutes later a car slows down outside. It comes to a stop. Caleb stops rubbing and fixes his attention on the driver as the interior light comes on. The driver spends five seconds checking something, probably the address, before getting out. He carries the pizzas and only makes it halfway to the door before two people jump out of a nearby car, and at the same time somebody races out from the front door of the house. They close in on the pizza delivery boy, who drops the pizzas.

  Caleb doesn’t hang around to watch anymore. The judge isn’t there, and even if he was, there would be no way to get to him. Whitby’s mother will be the same.

  He walks back to the car, slowly shaking his head. He switches on the radio and listens to the news as he drives. The police have been to the slaughterhouse. They’ve found Melanie Stanton alive and well.

  He punches the steering wheel. Octavia wakes up. He can hear her moaning through the duct tape. Caleb drives with no idea where to go next.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  My headache has gone and there are flecks of vomit on my shirt that I’ve tried to wipe off with my hands. It’s five-thirty before I see the first of the patrol cars that Schroder sent out to the neighborhood, which means I’ve been leaning against my car for thirty minutes. I flag it down. The guy behind the wheel looks pissed off and ready to arrest me until I show him and his partner my ID, at which point he then just looks pissed off. I’m pissed off too and ask what the hell took them so long, and he explains it in two words—boy-racers.

  We drive around the neighborhood with him doing all the driving and me doing all the bleeding and his partner stretching his head in every direction as he points a spotlight out the window lighting up the shadows. None of us are talking. Emotions are running high. There is no sign of Cole. During that time five other vehicles help in the search. The streets are quiet. Cole has moved on. I had it within my power to stop him. I was close, so close to getting Stanton and his other two daughters back.

  In the end I’m in enough pain and there’s enough blood in the backseat that we head for the hospital. Dog bites are not something I want to mess around with. It’s almost six o’clock when we hit the edge of town, and another half an hour to drive the final few miles thanks to the boy-racers and their cars and their desire to be accepted as part of what soon must be called a gang, or a cult, but for the moment is simply known to the rest of Christchurch as a fucking huge headache. I’m angry at missing the appointment with Forster and Bridget. We pull up outside the emergency room entrance and neither of the cops walks me inside. The good thing about the bite is it’s keeping me awake. The bad thing is my shoe is full of blood. The waiting room is full of people who have messed up at some point during the day, they’ve hit themselves with hammers and tripped on power cords, school kids with broken arms from soccer, housewives who have walked into doors when dinner wasn’t ready on time. I show my badge. That and the holes in my leg give me priority to the annoyance of everybody in the room. I’m taken through the doors into a cubicle and told to take my pants off. A few minutes later a doctor comes in. He prods the wound with his finger and not a lot of sympathy.

  “Looks bad,” the doctor says, and he looks bad too,
with his comb-over and bloodshot eyes, his breath smelling of coffee. “You’ll have to stay off it for a few days, and you’re going to need some shots. I’ll get a nurse to come along and clean it up, then I’ll come back and stitch it. My advice is to stay away from dogs.”

  The nurse is a heavyset woman with kind eyes and an even kinder smile. She tells me that I look like I’ve been through the wars. She tells me the wound is going to be okay, that the last dog bite victim she had to help had his nose, cheek, and ear removed. She tells me how sad that was, and still she keeps smiling as if she’s telling me how sweet her grandchildren are. She gives me two shots in my arm and both of them hurt. She finishes cleaning me up and I’m alone for ten minutes with a throbbing arm and throbbing leg before the doctor returns, other doctors and nurses passing in the hall, some looking fresh, others like they’ve been on their feet all day. He takes a look at the wound and nods. He injects it and waits a minute before poking a needle at it.

  “You feel that?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  Some of the holes are deeper than the others, some wider, all of them look about as mean as each other.

  “I’ve been getting headaches,” I tell him.

  He doesn’t look up from his work, just keeps on stitching. “What kind?”

  “Bad ones,” I say, and I tell him about the attack that started them with the glass jar, and about what happened today.

  “You need to see somebody,” he tells me.

  “I’m seeing you.”

  He shakes his head. “You know what I mean. Why haven’t you been to see anybody already?”

  “I just figured they’d disappear.”

  Finally he looks up in mid-stitch. “And how’s that been working out for you?”

  “Not well,” I admit.

  “You taking painkillers?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have an addictive personality. I didn’t want to risk it.”

  “Okay. So your plan was to never do anything about it, just a wait-and-see attitude, and now you mention it just because you happen to be here. Is that the same logic you put into your job, Detective?”

  “No,” I say, breaking eye contact with him. I wish I’d never bought it up.

  “No. Exactly. Just headaches?” he asks, putting down the thread and the hook-shaped needle. He reaches into his top pocket and pulls out a flashlight.

  “Sometimes I get dizzy too. And earlier I couldn’t talk.”

  “You were punched, right?”

  “Yes.”

  He shines the light into my eyes. “Both pupils are dilating normally,” he says. “What else?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Loss of time? Have you collapsed? Are you forgetting things? Loss of motor skills?”

  “My arm wouldn’t work earlier after the attack, but only for a minute.”

  “Okay,” he says, and he puts the flashlight back into his pocket.

  “Okay?”

  “Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to finish stitching you up, and then I’m going to have you admitted.”

  “I don’t have time for that.”

  “What do you have time for? For dying? Because that’s what might happen if we don’t take a better look at you. You’ve had trauma today to a preexisting trauma from an attack where a glass jar was broken against the side of your head. You obviously have some intracranial injury. When you were slugged in the head today that could have killed you. You hit your head against a wall tomorrow and that could kill you. You could just as easily die tonight lying down in bed.”

  “Thanks for sugarcoating it for me. Listen, I’ll be careful, I promise, and when this case is over I’ll be right back. Can’t you just write me a script?”

  He sighs, then slowly nods. “Fine,” he says. He pulls out a prescription pad. He scrawls across it and hands me the top sheet. He’s written “Walking out of here might kill you.” He’s underlined it. I fold it up and slip it into my pocket.

  It takes over thirty stitches and twenty minutes to close all of the wounds. When he’s done the nurse comes back and bandages me up. Then she insists on taking me into another room in a wheelchair. It’s a smooth ride. The office she wheels me into has pictures of brains on the wall, illustrated cross sections of it, and a model brain on the desk.

  “Wait here,” she says.

  “Honestly, I feel fine now,” I tell her.

  “Good. Then what I’m saying should make sense to you.”

  It does make sense. She steps out of the room and I sit in the silence listening to my body, and it’s telling me that for now it’s okay. It’s telling me there are more important things to be doing. It makes a convincing argument, so convincing in fact that I climb out of the wheelchair and step into the corridor. I take the opposite direction from the way I came, loop around the halls until I find an exit, then leave. I do all of that with perfect balance. There are taxis parked outside and I climb into the one at the front and take a ride to the police station.

  The boy-racers must be blocking the other side of town or have gone home to jerk off to The Fast and the Furious. The car I used before has been driven back for me. My leg hurts when I walk, and hurts when I don’t walk, though not as much. I call Dr. Forster on the way into the police building and have to leave another message.

  I start to feel a bit dizzy walking into the police station, and I feel sick when the elevator takes me up to the fourth floor—it feels like the world is dropping out from under me—but for the most part I feel pretty good. I lean against the wall to keep the weight off my leg. If my next assignment involves infiltrating a line-dancing ring I’m going to lose my job. The doors open and reveal every detective in a state of information gathering, they’re on phones and on computers and reading files. Schroder comes over from the coffee machine and takes a look at me.

  “They don’t have to cut it off?” he asks.

  “You look like shit,” I tell him.

  “Funny, I was going to tell you the same thing.”

  “Where’s the girl?”

  “In my office,” he says. “We need to interview her, but first we have to clear something up. We’re looking for Ariel Chancellor. So far there’s no word on her whereabouts, but to be clear you got there and found her door already open, saw drugs on the table, and that gave you reason to enter. That how it played out?” he asks me, but he’s not really asking, he’s telling me the scenario.

  “Exactly.”

  “That’s what I thought. Run through it for me.”

  We walk to his office, the dizziness from the elevator gone. I run though it for him, changing the details from breaking in to walking in an open door and calling out hello.

  “Well, nobody in the area saw a thing,” he says, “but we did get a complaint from one of the neighbors. They said you kicked their dog in the head.”

  I tighten my jaw and hold onto a sudden burst of anger. “They let it loose on me. They were telling the damn thing to attack!”

  “Well, they’re making a complaint. They’re going to push it, no doubt to see if they can get a settlement. They’re saying you trespassed and abused them and assaulted their pet.”

  My hand curls into a fist and I look at the wall wanting to punch it, and there are already other fist-shaped holes in it. Most of those holes have been signed and dated, a wall of fame of sorts, smiley faces drawn next to some. I relax my fist. “Are you shitting me?”

  He shrugs. “I wish I was. I got a sketch artist coming upstairs to talk with you—just to get a more current description of Cole.”

  “Unbelievable,” I say.

  “Let it go, Tate, we’ve got more important things to worry about.”

  “Like interviewing the girl.”

  “About that,” he says. “You remember Benson Barlow?” he asks.

  Barlow is a psychiatrist I met six weeks ago out at Grover Hills, the now abandoned mental institution where an ex—mental
patient was holed up with a collection of dead bodies and an even bigger collection of really bad ideas.

  “What about him?”

  “He’s on his way to talk to the girl. I figure it can’t hurt. She’s pretty traumatized. She’s not talking much, but she’s shaking and crying a hell of a lot. We’ve got a female officer in there with her now trying to comfort her, but it’s not going great. Poor kid was initially found covered in fake blood. Probably came from the same shop the fake knife came from.”

  “Fake knife?”

  “Yeah, one of those types where the blade goes into the handle.”

  “So he pretended to kill her?”

  “Looks that way,” Schroder says. “Plus the only thing she’s really said is the same thing a few times, which is she was the one chosen.”

  “Chosen?”

  Schroder shrugs. “Hopefully Barlow can find out for sure, but I’m guessing she was the one chosen to be killed. Or fake killed, as it turned out.”

  “For the doctor’s benefit?”

  “What other reason is there?” he asks. “Like I said, that’s all she’s said because she’s so damn scared. My guess is he sedated her first. I mean, not much point in pretending to have stabbed her if she’s lying on the floor moving around okay.”

  “He asked me what kind of monster I thought he was,” I say, picturing him standing over me after he’d kicked me in the stomach. Caleb Cole with his scarred face and clenched fists. “I don’t think he’s capable of killing children, but he must want Stanton to think otherwise.”