The Thief of All Light

by Bernard Schaffer

“No.”

  “Well, I don’t see why they’d need to go anywhere,” she said. “All you need to do is sit at home and turn on the TV. There’s stuff about serial killers on every other channel.”

  “That’s the first almost right thing you said today.”

  “So I’m right?” she said.

  “I said almost right.”

  “What good is being almost right?”

  “For you? Let’s take the small wins wherever we find them.”

  17

  THE AUTOMATIC DOORS SLID OPEN AT THEIR APPROACH. POTTED plants and large cardboard signs advertising local bingo night and book club meetings adorned either side of the entrance. Carrie looked at a line of women at the checkout counter holding armfuls of books, and said, “This is where young lunatics go when they want to learn about killing people? The library?”

  “Yes, the library,” he said. “Think about it. You’re a young, poor, troubled white male driven by hormones and powerful sexual energy. You fantasize about hurting people. Killing them. Taking things out of them. Cutting holes in their bodies you can stick your penis inside of.”

  The group of women standing near the desk turned around, eyes wide, glaring at Rein. Carrie held up her hands. “Sorry! It’s okay, honest.”

  Rein was oblivious to them, still talking over his shoulder. “Where can you go to learn? To feed your fascination? It has to be somewhere that doesn’t look suspicious.” His eyes scanned the computer desks, filled with young mothers searching help wanted ads, homeless people killing time, and older people fumbling with the mouse and keyboard. “Somewhere right out in the open.”

  “Wait,” Carrie said. “Who said anything about being poor and white?” She looked at him with renewed admiration and said, “You developed one already?”

  “One what?”

  “That is so cool! How did you do it? I need to know. I read everything by Ressler, and I used to try doing it with burglars, but they just aren’t complex enough, right? There’s not enough methodology, normally, unless you’re talking about a serial burglar. But God, the whole thing is so fascinating.”

  “What is?”

  She looked at him in confusion. “You developed a profile on the suspect, right?”

  Rein leaned forward. “Listen to me. Profiling is nonsense. Understand? Snake oil. Voodoo. It’s the fictional equivalent of something we used to call common sense and deductive reasoning.”

  “So how do you know he’s poor and white?”

  He looked her up and down. “Did you grow up rich?”

  She snickered. “Hardly.”

  “Were you poor?”

  “We got by.”

  “Did you have food stamps?”

  Her eyes lowered. “So what if we did? My dad was sick a lot.”

  “How often did you go to the doctor?”

  “Only when it was serious. I broke my arm once and needed to get stitches another time. The rest of the times we toughed it out.”

  Rein snapped his fingers at her. “Exactly. Doctors are expensive. Medicine is expensive. Now, let’s say you’re rich and you begin acting strange. You begin having vivid hallucinations or fantasize about women getting eaten alive by alligators, or you start having sex with dogs. What do your parents do?”

  “They take you to the best doctor in town and get you help.”

  “The best doctors, the best medicines, the best hospitals, and if the kid never gets better, they put him in the best institution for the rest of his life, where he can never embarrass Daddy and Mommy at the country club. Right?”

  “Right,” Carrie agreed. “And if the kid comes from a poor family, they have to make do with whatever they can afford, which probably isn’t much. Plus, he’d come to the library because it’s free.”

  “Now you’re thinking. So why is our suspect most likely white?”

  “Because aren’t all serial killers white?”

  “Wrong. Most serial killers are white. Not all. Try again.”

  “Well,” she said, “we live in a predominantly white area. If he’s from here, he’s most likely Caucasian.”

  “Better. You’re getting close. But there’s another more simplistic and brutal reason. A young, psychotic male will have multiple contacts with the police. If the cops come in contact with a psychotic black male enough times, you know what they do?”

  Carrie looked around to see who was standing nearby them, uncomfortable with the conversation. People were staring. “I get it, okay? Point made.”

  “Who do cops kill, Carrie?”

  “Stop.”

  “They kill young black males. All the time. Especially ones they have repeated contact with, and even more especially when they are dangerously deranged. And if the cops don’t kill them, the courts put them in jail where nobody notices their deteriorating mental health. Common sense and deductive reasoning. The suspect we are looking for is most likely white.”

  “Fine,” Carrie said, lowering her voice. “Can we just get started already?”

  “All right. Our suspect wasn’t just looking for books about murders. He was fascinated by the entire process. He came here looking for books on anatomy, wanting to see how all the organs looked inside the body, trying to decide which ones he wanted to eat, or which intestines he wanted to wear around his neck like a scarf.”

  A woman with a young child looked up from the nearby computer desk, glaring at Rein as he spoke.

  Carrie cringed. “Will you please keep your voice down?”

  “We need every medical book, true crime, police procedure, surgical, and obviously anything to do with serial killers. I want a list of everyone in the past fifteen years who took out those kinds of books on a regular basis. From there, we can check for poor white males, run their criminal histories, prior contacts, and mental health issues. It’s not much, but it’s a start.”

  “Let’s do it like this,” Carrie said, moving ahead of him. “You find every book you think applies and bring it to me. I will write down all the names and information.” She looked past him at the librarians, seeing that they were scowling at Rein. She couldn’t blame them. With his long hair and beard, he looked like a hobo. With his loud voice ranting about killing people, he sounded like a dangerous hobo. “Listen, you need to turn it down a notch in here with all the intestinal stuff, okay? They’re going to kick us out.”

  “I’m working. This is how I work. You don’t like how I do it, you can leave. Or better yet, I can leave. It’s not like I need to be here. You came to me, remember?”

  “I remember,” she said. “I didn’t take you for the type that likes to scare women and children, though.”

  His nostrils flared, but he said nothing. Instead, he backed away from her and turned, heading for the nearest aisle with his hands in his pockets, eyes down. A woman he passed pulled her daughter out of his way.

  * * *

  Someone had left a copy of The Notebook on the desk to be put back by the librarians, and Carrie saw it as she came to the last stack of books piled in front of her. She put it on the seat next to her, saying, “Lucky for you Molly isn’t here. You’d probably be covered in snot and big baby tears by the third chapter.” She looked down at the book and whispered, “I don’t care what she says. You’re still a crappy book.”

  “Screw you,” Molly shouted. “The Notebook is my favorite! It’s a beautiful love story. No wonder you hated it.”

  “I liked the part at the end where he forced himself on her after reading her that dumb letter,” Carrie fired back. “There she is, lying on her bed, too riddled with dementia to get up and use the toilet on her own, and what does Mr. Beautiful Love Story do? Pulls off her diaper and humps the poor lady.”

  “She wasn’t wearing a diaper!” Molly’s voice cracked. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Name one old person sitting in an old-age home with dementia that isn’t wearing a diaper, you idiot.”

  “There is something seriously wrong with you, Carrie. I’m not kidding. An
ybody who could read The Notebook and think those things is not a good person. You’ve got the devil in you. Demons out!” Molly said, reaching forward and smacking Carrie right between the eyes.

  Carrie sat there, stunned, until both of them burst out laughing, clutching each other and laughing so hard they cried.

  She used her cell phone camera to photograph the covers and library cards of the books Rein had collected, making sure she got all of the names scribbled on the cards in focus. She remembered filling out the same kind of cards herself as a kid. Nowadays, everyone was issued a library keycard with a bar code, and the librarians just scanned it at the desk, tracking whoever had their books via computer. God help you if you stole it.

  The Pennsylvania Crimes Code listed several strange anomalies that mystified Carrie. For instance, aggravated assault was a Felony 1, the highest criminal charge below murder. A Felony 1 carried a penalty of up to twenty years in prison. However, it was almost impossible to get a conviction on aggravated assault.

  Aggravated assault was written for whoever caused, or attempted to cause, serious bodily injury to another person. It sounded deceptively simple. The problem was that years of vigorous appeals had twisted and morphed the sentencing guidelines into something incomprehensible. It all boiled down to the use of the word “serious.” Enough defense attorneys had argued enough times that practically no one could agree on just what constituted “serious” anymore.

  In Carrie’s previous trial, a man had stomped a woman on the head so hard it fractured her right orbital socket and almost dislocated her eyeball. “That sounds goddamn serious to me,” Carrie had said while writing the criminal complaint that night. Unfortunately, by the time the trial came around six months later, the victim had healed. All that was left was a little tenderness around the woman’s eye, a hospital report written in medical jargon, and photographs of the injury.

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” the public defender said. “I ask you. How serious could it have really been? Look at this beautiful young woman sitting here before you without a mark on her. She was drunk. My client was drunk. They had a fight. It got out of hand. But does my client deserve to spend twenty years of his young life in a state prison for something that did no lasting harm?”

  Not guilty.

  On the contrary, simple assault was much easier to establish and to prove. You had to show only that the defendant caused or attempted to cause someone bodily harm. The mystifying part was that the charge was a stunted Misdemeanor 2. It carried a maximum penalty of just two years in jail, which nobody ever served. Misdemeanor 2 convictions paroled out in a few weeks for good behavior and went right back home.

  Those are the only two assault charges available in Pennsylvania, much like the rest of the country.

  Aggravated assault at Felony 1 and simple assault at Misdemeanor 2. Everything else was a summary offense. A glorified traffic ticket.

  Library theft was another one. The way the law read, if you stole anything from the library one time, it was a summary offense. For instance, she thought, if you stole The Notebook it was just a summary offense.

  But if you were one of the people who liked it and came back to steal Message in a Bottle, then it was a misdemeanor. And if, for some godforsaken reason, you liked that and were compelled to come back and steal A Walk to Remember, well, then it became a Felony 1, punishable by up to twenty years in prison. Any idiot who liked Nicholas Sparks enough to do that deserved to be in jail, as far as Carrie was concerned. The only authors worth going to jail for were named Cormac, Elmore, or JK, she thought. Not debatable.

  Carrie picked The Notebook back up and pressed it against her chest, feeling warm in the pit of her being. Something was telling her everything was going to be all right. Someone was listening to her. Watching her work. Sending her messages to keep going. She’d prayed in the woods that night at the playground, and nothing had happened, but that was all right, she thought. Sometimes you needed to be tested and found worthy. She looked up at the ceiling, imagining that she was peering deep into the cosmos, and whispered, “Thank you.”

  At the other end of the table, Rein was looking through the books Carrie had sorted, double-checking their library cards. She called out to him and said, “You making sure I didn’t miss anything?”

  “No,” he said, peering down at one of the cards before sliding it back in its sleeve and setting it aside.

  “Oh,” she said. “What are you looking for, then? I’ll help you.”

  His large, dark eyes were bright and sharp despite the ragged, weathered look of his hairy face. He turned the pages on another book and checked the back. “If I find what I’m looking for, it’s something I will have to handle personally.”

  18

  THE GPS ANNOUNCED THEIR DESTINATION. CARRIE PEERED OVER the steering wheel, seeing only a small metal sign for the Barnetta Police Department warning people that the parking lot was for official vehicles only. Rein was snoring as she turned in. “Wake up, old man. You took us to the wrong place.”

  He grunted as he sat up, rubbing his eyes, then opening them wide. “What?”

  “This isn’t the Barnetta library.” She pointed at the police department’s front door. “You must’ve punched in the wrong address. Look at this dump.” It was even more run down than her own department’s headquarters. The front door was rusted through its cracked green paint job. The windows were black and covered with so much film they looked like they’d been soaped over. She picked up the GPS and searched for the input screen. “Let’s try this again. Where did you mean to go?”

  Rein let himself out of the car and said, “Right here.” He closed the door and tapped his hands on the roof. “Come on. We’re losing daylight.”

  “Well, I guess somebody’s all energized from his afternoon nap,” she said. “I bet you’re really missing your slippers and rocking chair right about now, huh?”

  He pulled the station’s front door open so hard that it knocked a cloud of red and green rust off the frame. “You have your badge, right?”

  She tapped her back pocket. “Right here.”

  “You’re going to need it.”

  The lobby was the size of a dining room table, with a locked door on one side and a thick bulletproof glass window at the other. An older woman with pinched lips looked at them through the police clerk’s window. The plastic frames of her eyeglasses were thick, and fake pearls dangled from either side. They rattled as she sorted the papers on her desk. “We close in two minutes,” she said before Carrie could speak. “If you need a copy of a report, you have to come back tomorrow.”

  “Show her your badge,” Rein said.

  Carrie dug out her wallet and flipped it open, revealing the silver shield inside. “I’m Officer Santero.” She glanced at Rein, who was keeping his head down so that his long hair blocked the woman’s view of his face. “And this is, um, we’re here for . . .”

  “Working a homicide.”

  “Working a homicide investigation,” Carrie repeated.

  The clerk folded her hands. “We haven’t had any homicides in fifteen years. What do you need from us?”

  Rein turned his back to the woman and lowered his voice. “Tell her you want to see all their records for contacts with Alan Lloyd.”

  Carrie repeated what he said and added, “Please.”

  The clerk turned an ear toward the window but did not get up from her chair. “What name was that, dear?”

  Rein was frustrated at having to speak through someone else but closed his eyes and leaned close to Carrie’s ear, saying, “Just tell them we need to see all their incident reports for Lloyd in the past several years, and we need them now.”

  Carrie watched the woman’s stare flick back and forth between the two of them and smiled warmly. “Ma’am, I know it’s a little late and you want to get out of here. All I need you to do is look in your computer for any contacts with an Alan Lloyd. It’s important, I promise, or else I wouldn’t have driven all the
way out here.” She glanced sideways at Rein. “It is important, right?”

  Before Rein could respond, the woman said, “Is this some kind of joke?”

  Rein turned toward the window, eyes glowering, “No, it is not a joke. It is an official request for cooperation. Now, either give us what we want or we’ll go get a search warrant and come back and tear this place to pieces. Then you can explain to your chief why he doesn’t have a computer system anymore. We will take every filing cabinet in this building if you push me.”

  The clerk’s pinched lips tightened to the size of a pinhead. “You know what? I’ve had enough. Wait right here.”

  “We’ve got all day.” He folded his arms as the woman walked away, then looked at Carrie and winked. “There’s a time to ask, and there’s a time to tell.”

  “I had that under control.”

  “You were taking too long.”

  “It’s called the soft sell, Rein. Now she’s gonna be pissed at us and we’ll be lucky to get any information at all.”

  “Then we go get a warrant.”

  “Who’s we? You filing warrants now? I think you mean me, and if I’m the one who has to put my name on this stuff, you let me decide how to deal with it, all right?”

  “Fine.”

  “Who the hell is Alan Lloyd, anyway?”

  Rein stretched his mouth wide, sharp teeth emerging from under the mass of hair covering his face. He cocked his neck side to side, cracking it both ways, taking his time before he answered. “Krissing didn’t just take girls. He took a couple of boys, too. Kept them as his assistants, sort of. Made them do things. To the girls. Each other. Him. We found two at the scene, chained to the basement wall by their necks, lying side by side. One of them had already expired by the time we got there. The coroner said it was from dehydration. Krissing was so busy with the others he forgot to give them water. The other boy just barely made it.”

  “Alan Lloyd,” Carrie said. “It was his name you were checking for at the library. You think he might be our doer.”

  “I’m not sure,” Rein said. “I used to keep track of all the kids, just making sure, you know. But then everything else happened. I suppose that’s no excuse. I should have kept tabs.”