THE DEAD SOUL: A Thriller

by M. William Phelps

  It was hot inside the greenhouse. Jake kept having to rub beads of sweat from his brow. His T-shirt was soaked from his neck down along his spine.

  Like the cop he was, Jake ordered, “Get on the ground, put your hands behind your back.”

  “… I cannot breathe,” Father John struggled to say.

  “I told you, Father, not to speak.”

  The Optimist backed the priest toward the door.

  Jake followed each step, making sure not to crowd the psycho.

  With his foot, the Optimist jerked open the door. Then dragged Father John into the small foyer.

  Jake rushed to the door, stopped it just before closing.

  The Optimist dragged Father John with him up the stairs. At the top was one-way door leading out onto the rooftop.

  Jake lost sight of them. He did not walk in. The rest of the team moved closer, swarming around Jake. A blue got on the radio. “He’s heading up to the roof. Get a bird over here now.”

  “No helicopter.” Jake sounded firm. “I want the building surrounded. We do not push him.”

  “It is already, Detective.”

  “Good. Seal off this entryway and any other entrance or exit from the roof. I’m going up there—alone. I don’t want anyone following too close. All he has is a knife.”

  “All that we know of, you mean.”

  “Right. Whatever. Toss me your radio.”

  Jake pulled his foot away from the door, allowed it to close. He put the radio in his back pocket. Took off his windbreaker, dropped it on the ground.

  Up on the top stairs landing, Father John gave it one more try. “Please, Randy. Give yourself up. Listen to me. I can help you.”

  The Optimist closed his eyes. He bounced the back edge of his knife off the bridge of his nose. He was thinking as he took deep, quick breaths, psyching himself up.

  Father John said, “You don’t need to give into evil, Randy.”

  The Optimist opened his eyes. Raised his head. Stared eye-level at Father John, looking through him.

  He pictured his mother. Her long blonde hair flowing over one side of the bed. Her head jerking up and back as one of those men pumped his way deeper inside. He could hear her moaning. I like that … harder. He was in the closet inside her room. Harder, baby. She didn’t know he was there.

  The little boy closed his eyes.

  Harder. Yes. Yes …

  Every once in a while he’d open his eyes, look through the slats in the door. Yes … oh, yes. His mother’s head bounced as if she were on a horse.

  There was a hiccup in his mind. Silence. He snapped out of it. Smiled. Lifted the knife over his shoulder—in what seemed to be slow motion—and stabbed the priest in the chest with one overhead motion, burying the blade somewhere near his heart. He looked into the priest’s eyes, pulling the knife out of him slowly. Then licked the cold steel while watching the life drain out of Father John’s face.

  The priest gasped. Grabbed at his chest.

  It didn’t take much, but the Optimist gave the priest a nudge. And Father John tumbled down the stairs, finally landing and rolling into the door.

  90

  Monday, September 15 – 1:59 P.M.

  Jake heard a thump. Turned. It came from inside the foyer. He opened the door with caution. Saw Father John struggling to breathe. Hyperventilating, his legs bucked as though he had gone into an epileptic shock.

  Jake grabbed the priest by the arm and pulled him into the greenhouse. “Get him some help!” Stepping into the foyer slowly, Jake took a cautionary gaze up the stairs. He did not want to get stabbed in the face if the Optimist was waiting in the shadows of the dark. Kneeling by the railing, using the corner brick as cover, Jake pointed his .357 toward the roof entrance and took a step.

  A beam of light brightened the stairway—then it went dark again as Jake heard the door above close.

  After hurrying up the stairs and kicking the door open, on top of the roof, Jake looked in all directions.

  The Optimist was nowhere to be found.

  Walking on the rooftop with guarded composure, Jake thought of what Dickie had said on the phone moments ago. “We’re on our way to the Back Bay Marina. We think she might be on his boat.”

  Jake knew Dawn was dead. And now he needed to kill her killer. Revenge was all he had left.

  Standing on the roof, the Charles River at his back, the wind blew fiercely. Jake could hear the stifled hum of traffic running north and south off in the distance on I-93. He spun around, three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, the city’s blurry skyline twirling in his vision. A part of the building jetted out over the Charles.

  Where are you?

  Jake ran toward the south edge. He looked down at the roof of a second building below, the Planetarium. It was connected to the conservatory. Just a short jump—about five feet—down and on top of the next rooftop. It was the only way the Optimist could have gone. Every other area of the roof led to a dead end.

  Jake leapt.

  Landing on both feet, he heard something. Movement. Stones grinding against shoes.

  He turned.

  The Optimist popped out from behind a large heating and air-conditioning mechanism. It was taller than him. In between Jake and Optimist was a glass skylight as big as a garage door. They had to be careful, or risk falling through.

  The sun burned hot through the wind. Jake could smell the tar from the roof heating up, melting. In all that was going on, he couldn’t get the thought of working construction that one summer before joining the BPD out of his mind, patching potholes all over the city. It was that hot asphalt odor. So distinctive. Memorable.

  The Optimist held his knife as if he were a carnival performer, ready to toss it at Jake like a dart. They stood about ten feet away from each other on opposite sides of the skylight. Jake had a clear shot. He could end it right now.

  “You’re finished. Lay down. Put your hands behind your head.”

  “Curious. Your partner, Detective. Did he have good news for you?”

  “We have her, Meyers. Back Bay Marina. She’s alive.”

  The Optimist turned red-faced. He screamed. “Don’t you lie to me! Do you think for one minute I would allow her to live?”

  Jake felt a pang in his gut. He swallowed. No response.

  “Control, Detective. I controlled her destiny—and now you control mine. Funny how it all worked out, huh?”

  The Optimist walked closer to the skylight. Tapped his knife on the glass.

  “I should just kill you, Meyers. What do we have between us? Nothing. You’re just a piece of shit. A psycho this city could stand to get rid of.”

  Lined up along the roof of the building Jake had jumped down from were a group of five officers, each dressed in riot gear, armed with rifles, kneeling, their weapons pointed at the Optimist. Jake spotted them out of the corner of his eye.

  The Optimist looked. “I bet you gave orders not to follow, didn’t you?”

  Jake made a break for the Optimist, running right at him, screaming as loud as he could to cause a distraction. He had to go around the skylight. As he approached, the Optimist jumped on the skylight, breaking shards of glass in a circular pattern, like splashing water. It was loud and unsettling. A few stray slivers, sharp and pointy as icicles, hit Jake as he got down on his knees and covered himself with his hands.

  If he survived the fall, the Optimist was now inside the Planetarium.

  Jake got up. Brushed himself off. Looked in the through the hole. It was dark. He could see a ticket counter, a mess of glass, spurs of wood from the broken window frame all over the floor. He stood above the area of the Planetarium where patrons waited in line to get in. Twelve feet down.

  Probably not enough to kill the sonofabitch.

  “Surround the inside of the planetarium.” Jake tossed the radio after giving the order. The team of riot police came up behind him. “I’m gonna finish this now for good.”

  91

  Monday, September 15 – 2:09 P.M
.

  The Optimist hid under the ticket counter. After jumping through the glass, he hit the ground and rolled. As he did, pieces of glass embedded into different areas of his body. He was huddled in the corner. Cold and shaking, he looked at the cuts all over his hands and legs, several small pieces of glass sticking out of his ankles and elbows. His right side burned. Looking at it, he noticed an elongated, triangular-shaped shard of glass protruding out of his skin near his appendix. Blood flowed from it steadily. It was an odd feeling. There was no significant, throbbing pain from the lesions, but more of a numbing sensation, reminding him that he was supposed to feel pain.

  Huddled there in the corner underneath the ticket counter like a wounded animal, that sense of helplessness he had endured after the Teacher chained his leg to the furnace in the basement and abused him came back. He saw Micah grab him by the back of the head—the memory almost an out-of-body experience—and inch his face toward the furnace door as a fire raged inside. He could hear him. “You tell anyone and I’ll douse you with gasoline and burn you alive.”

  Small shards of glass fell from above as Jake walked around the opening on the roof. He must be contemplating how to jump down, the Optimist considered. The bits of glass fell in front of Rainn Meyers and bounced off the red carpet.

  Blood ran down his forearms and the side of his hip. His socks and underwear were saturated.

  The Optimist felt the game had played out exactly how he had planned. That “incongruous compound of good and evil” was there in everything he and Jake did. He said those six words over and over in his mind. Incongruous compound of good and evil. A quote from the book—The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—that kept him company all those nights when he believed the world was against him. When he realized his sins had sent him to Bainbridge. Nothing else. Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale had become Randy Meyers’s reality.

  Every thought I ever had centered on self.

  There were two of him. He knew that now.

  Jake landed directly in front of the counter, his calves facing the Optimist. The trip down from the roof was loud and surely painful.

  The killer who could not resist the temptation stared.

  As Jake hit the ground, the Optimist stabbed the detective just above his knee, in the meaty ham-shank section of his thigh. As Jake reacted, grabbing his leg and falling on his back, it gave the killer enough time to crawl out from underneath the counter and limp his way into the Planetarium.

  92

  Monday, September 15 – 2:15 P.M.

  Clutching his thigh with both hands, Jake Cooper thrashed on the floor.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the Optimist head into the Planetarium. Taking a lesson he had learned running on the streets of Southie, the cop reacted without thinking. He tore off his shirt and ripped a long strip from it. Then yanked the knife out in one quick extraction, screaming in pain and tossing the knife on the carpet, before tying the strip of cloth around his thigh in a makeshift tourniquet.

  It burned—lemon juice squeezed on an open wound.

  Jake stood as upright as he could. Caught his breath. Checked his gun to make sure his .357 was loaded and ready. Then hobbled into the Planetarium, the barrel of his weapon leading the way.

  It was dark inside the immense, sphere-shaped room. It smelled of cleaning fluids—bleach and Pine-Sol, the same synthetic, fake-fresh odor the precinct took on after the night crew finished its work. The domelike screen covering the ceiling gave off a bit of light because it was so, well, white. The red-and-black exit signs brightened up the aisles. Yet it was hard to see anything beyond a ten-foot radius of where you stood.

  Jake heard a seat rattle. Then a tired laugh. “She begged for her life, Detective.” The Optimist’s voice echoed loudly throughout the empty room.

  Jake’s leg stiffened. Cramped. The makeshift noose kept the bleeding to a minimum. But it hurt like hell.

  “What’s happening here, Meyers?” Jake looked down the rows and aisles of seats. Bending down as far as he could, he didn’t see anything.

  “I hear the trumpets of angels, Detective.” The Optimist had a hard time speaking. “Oh, how beautiful they sound. They’re singing my name.”

  “This is over, Meyers.”

  “As you know by now, Jake, I am not a rapist. But I need to tell you that I did have sex with your wife. It was not fun.”

  Jake squeezed his eyes closed as a mountain of rage welled up.

  “You know, I was going to bury Brendan and leave a map for you to find him—with a window of opportunity, that sort of thing.”

  Jake flashed on an image of the little girl. Her mouth full of dirt. Her fingernails broken and oily from trying to dig her way out of the hole. Her favorite stuffed animal—a Webkinz seal—still in her arms. The pathologist had confirmed Jake was minutes away from saving her.

  “I’m going to kill you, Meyers,” Jake whispered. He knew the killer could hear him.

  “Doing that to Brendan, I thought, shit, maybe it would be too much. Send you over the edge. Then our game would be over. No more fun.”

  Jake heard a soft squeak from the rubber sole of a shoe, a gym floor during a basketball game. It came from over by the stage in the middle of the room. The Planetarium’s projector, a praying mantis-looking apparatus, stood tall as a man, its dome-shaped ball, the singing end of a microphone, pointed toward the ceiling.

  Jake dropped to the ground. His butt nearly touched the floor. He had his back against the side of the stage. His thigh throbbed. He fought through the burn, which had turned into a pure toothache-like pain magnified by a thousand. He felt a trickle of warm blood run down his leg. He now knew where the Optimist was hiding. He was close enough to see his shadow, faint as it was, casting an outline beyond the planetarium’s projector. He could hear his labored bleeding.

  He’s hurt.

  The Optimist hid on the opposite edge of the platform, just beyond where the projector was bolted to the stage. He had no idea where Jake was, or that Jake knew his location. He kept looking in different directions. It was no use. His vision was blurred. He had bled so much from being cut by the glass, the puncture wound to his appendix hemorrhaging so profusely, he was dizzy. Falling in and out. Running a fever. Sweating. Rocking back and forth.

  He sat on his butt. Back against a waist-high wooden wall. Held his side.

  Jake was quiet. He moved with the grace of a burglar, making little noise, inching his way along the edge of the stage. Closing in on the Optimist, he could hear him wheezing, taking long, labored breaths, hospital machine-like.

  Darth Vader.

  About five feet from his target, Jake stopped. He walked eight paces out in front of the Optimist, who could not see him.

  But the killer heard him. He looked straight ahead.

  “That you, Jakester?” he somehow managed to say in raspy, hoarse tone.

  Jake set a good bead on his target. The light from an overhead exit sign projected just enough to give him a clear vantage point.

  The Optimist spoke as loud as he could through the pain. “Jake, did you know that sin and evil are … are … ow … manifestations of self-centeredness and pride … shit, ow … that lead to oppression against others?” He bit his lip. Tried not to groan. It was over.

  Jake did not say a word.

  “ ‘A qualm has come over me,’ Detective.” He laughed. “That’s R.L. Stevenson.” It was his favorite line from the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story.

  Jake lined up the sight on his .357 with the Optimist’s forehead—that tiny space between his eyebrows.

  “You see the monsters Southie produces … I am evidence. But then, so are you, Detective. We are not so different.”

  Jake looked over his shoulder toward the entrances. He heard something. Back-up was preparing to enter the room. He could hear them stirring. He and the Optimist had ten more seconds alone. The Optimist was ready to pass out.

  Jake whispered over the barrel of his weapon, one eye clos
ed, his Magnum still locked on the Optimist’s forehead. “I’m going to do you a favor.”

  “Like a wounded horse.” The Optimist reached up, hit the switch over his left shoulder. The projector popped on, blasting a night sky above them onto the ceiling screen. It was as though he was back out on the ocean at midnight, staring up at the open heavens.

  Jake closed his eyes. Dropped his head. Not taking the gun off his mark.

  He couldn’t do this. He wasn’t a killer. The Optimist was no threat any longer.

  “You’re the same as me, Detective …”

  The two sets of double doors leading into the planetarium popped open. Matikas called out Jake’s name. Teams of blues dressed in face-shields and body armor, semi-automatic rifles, trekked down the aisles in lines.

  “Over here,” the Optimist said, raising a hand as high as he could, speaking with everything he had left. “I want to give myself up.”

  As he smiled at Jake, no doubt mocking him this one last time, he whispered, “I win!”

  The detective said, “Eat shit and die, asshole.” Then took the shot and hit the psycho square in the forehead, dropping him to the floor, spewing the back of his head into a million little pieces.

  THREE WEEKS LATER

  93

  Sunday, October 6 – 4:16 P.M.

  Jake was behind the wheel of an old Chevy S-10 pickup. For October, it was pretty warm out. Enough to make you sweat.

  Jake and his passenger rattled down a dirt road, the flimsy wheel wells of the truck leaving a dust cloud along the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee. Country music—some irritating song about a barbecue stain on a white T-shirt—was on the only station the AM radio was able to tune in. Brendan, sitting shotgun, smiled as Jake brushed the kid on top of his head. “You know what they say, buddy. Bad day of fishing is better than any day in school.”