Deams chuckled dryly. “I’m more than happy to face the best the District Attorney can throw at us.”
“Good.” Brass beamed. “You’re happy. I’m happy.”
Deams smirked. “Let me tell you what you have—a charge against my client for simple assault.”
Warrick said, “Not that simple—he kidnapped Mark Brower, and cut off his finger, and had him bound up in a torture chamber.”
“Mark Brower came to my client’s home and attacked him.”
Sara gave up a smile. “Really—so Mr. Dayton cut off Brower’s finger in self-defense? And put his head in a noose? That’ll be fun to hear you argue in court.”
Dayton frowned at his attorney, who then said to Brass and the CSIs, “Whatever you may have in the Brower matter is beside the point. You can’t really think you’re going to successfully prosecute my client for events that happened a decade ago?”
Brass said, “Mr. Dayton’s DNA hasn’t changed in ten years—and we have his DNA from then and now.”
“Stored under what conditions?” Deams said, waving that off as if it were nothing more than a bothersome gnat.
Warrick said, “We have voluminous physical evidence, Mr. Deams, including the fingers your client harvested from his victims, which we removed from his little basement museum.”
Deams even shrugged that off. “We believe Mark Brower planted that evidence in my client’s home.”
“Well, then Brower must’ve made your client help him out,” Warrick replied, “because only Jerome Dayton’s fingerprints are on those jars.”
The attorney gestured with open hands. “Circumstantial evidence. You have surprisingly little. Is there anything else?”
“You mean, other than your client running around bare-ass with blood all over him,” Brass said, “stabbing a police officer whose presence was backed up by a warrant?”
Deams twitched something that was not exactly a smile. “My client is … a troubled young man. He has a medical history, which includes medication that has been quite successful in curtailing his … problem.”
“Not lately,” Brass said.
“We will show that a physician recommended my client take a drug holiday—that’s a common practice for patients suffering chemical imbalance, who have been medicated for many years. It would appear that this holiday was … ill-advised.”
“Ill-advised?” Brass said. “Maybe we should prescribe your client’s doctor a lethal injection, too?”
“No such barbaric thing will happen to my client, Captain Brass. In fact, I’m quite sure this particular case will never get to trial.”
“Your ‘troubled’ client,” Brass said, “was institutionalized before, and yet he was out within three years. And now that Mommy and Daddy aren’t around to keep him in a druggy haze, he’s reverted to his ‘barbaric’ nature. No—even if you manage to convince a judge and jury that Jerry here doesn’t know the difference between right and wrong … and I grant you he’s a homicidal sociopath … he’ll be in a state institution that’ll make Sundown look like Club Med.”
Dayton finally spoke—three simple words, directed at Brass: “I hate you.”
“Well, that can be your new hobby, Jerry,” Brass said, “in your new padded pad.”
That did it.
Despite the cuffed wrists, Dayton came scrambling over the table at Brass, but Brass was ready and simply slipped aside, the killer sliding over the edge of the table, accidentally kicking his lawyer in the head before he landed face-first on the floor in an upended pile. The kick had sent Deams off balance, and he’d tumbled off his chair onto the floor as well.
A uniformed officer rushed in, but Brass waved him away, grabbing Dayton by the scruff of the neck and picking him up like a big plastic bag full of trash; then Warrick was on the other side of the prisoner and together they dragged the dazed Dayton around and sat him down in his chair, hard.
Sara had come around to help the flustered attorney to his feet, and Deams growled a thanks at her and proceeded to slap away at his expensive gray suit as if it had gotten filthy from his trip to the carpet of the spotless interview room.
Both CSIs and the homicide captain seemed more amused than frightened or even flustered by this lame attack from a known serial killer.
“Jerry,” Brass said, in a tone usually reserved for wayward children, “you really must watch that temper—someday you may do something really violent, and who knows what kind of trouble you’ll get yourself in.”
“I object,” the lawyer squeaked. He had finally stopped brushing away imaginary dirt from his suit.
“You’re not in court, counselor,” Brass said. “Sit down!”
The attorney drew in a breath through clenched teeth; but he sat.
Deams turned to Dayton and, quietly, said, “You don’t have to say anything. This interview is over when we say it’s over.”
Dayton was pouting; he might have been a six-year-old, stiffling tears. Stealing a glance at Brass, he said to the attorney, “I’m not afraid of him.”
Deams shook his finger in Dayton’s face. “You should be!”
Dayton lurched forward and bit down on the lawyer’s finger, just under the middle knuckle, viciously.
Deams was screaming and both Warrick and Brass came around the table once more, the uniformed officer who’d been stationed outside sprang in again, this time with gun in hand.
With Warrick behind him, holding on to him, Dayton released his toothy grip and the attorney drew his hand away; the flesh was broken but the digit was still intact.
“You’re not my father!” Dayton screamed.
The attorney, blinking fear and pain, said, “Jerry, you need to be quiet … just be quiet….”
“You are so fired!”
“Jerry, please—”
“I told you what he did to me, Deams, and you didn’t do anything!” Dayton strained forward as a cool Warrick held him by the shoulders. “You could have helped me! You let me go back to that house. Well, you’re lucky I didn’t make an example of you, too, counselor! Get out of my sight.”
Holding up his good hand, Deams said, “Slow down, Jerry—you don’t know what you’re doing or saying. Your emotions are running away with you. You need to calm down, and look at this rationally. So much is at stake….”
“You bleeding money out of me is at stake, you conniving asshole!” Looking across the table at Brass, Dayton said, “Get him out of here—now!”
Sara was at the attorney’s side. “Let’s get that finger looked at, shall we?”
Deams swallowed, nodded, and—after gathering up his briefcase and papers in his good arm—allowed Sara to take him by the elbow; but the attorney paused near the door to say pointedly to Brass, “If you continue this interview, outside of my presence, with my client in his current mental state, I will—”
“He’s not your client,” Brass said.
“Yeah!” Dayton yelled childishly, suddenly pals with Brass. “I’m not your client!”
The attorney, who was holding the hand with the damaged finger out in front of him, as if hailing a cab, said, “Tomorrow he’ll come to his senses. Tomorrow he’ll hire me back.”
“Today,” Brass said, “you’re not representing him. Good luck with the finger.”
Sara walked the lawyer out.
Brass gave the uniformed officer a nod, and he stepped out. Now it was just Brass, Dayton, and Warrick.
Dayton’s breathing—which had accelerated to that of a sprinter crossing the finish line—began to slow; his shoulders relaxed under Warrick’s grip, and suddenly it was like the CSI was giving the prisoner a massage.
“I’m okay,” he said, looking back at Warrick.
Warrick let go of him.
Dayton sat docilely, cuffed hands before him on the table. He slumped a little. He seemed placid now, and a little tired.
To Brass he said, “You and I … we may be … antagonists, but … we do understand each other. Respect each other … rig
ht?”
Brass and Warrick exchanged tiny significant glances.
“Sure, Jerry,” Brass said.
“I’ll talk to you. Tell you whatever you want to know. Start to finish, okay?”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“But just you, Captain. I don’t …” Dayton looked back at Warrick and said, “No offense, but you aren’t anything to me. The captain and me, we go way back.”
“No offense,” Warrick said.
Brass nodded and Warrick did, too, and went out. The CSI would be on the other side of the two-way mirror and the uniformed man would still be just outside. Dayton had no more fight in him.
He just wanted to talk.
“I hate that guy,” Dayton said.
“Warrick?”
“What, that tall guy? No, no—that goddamn attorney of my dad’s. He’s the one who got me sent out to Sundown, and that place was a nightmare.”
“Really.”
“Locked up, doped up, no TV after ten, monitored everything you read—cancelled my Hustler subscription!”
Forcing any irony from his voice, Brass said, “Sounds like cruel and unusual punishment to me, Jerry.”
“You know what the worst part was?”
“Tell me.”
“Nobody there but crazy people. Everybody was a damn … loon! Do you know what it’s like to deal with loons all day long?”
“I can imagine.”
“I don’t think you can.”
“But your father and his attorney, they got you out. Why are you mad about that?”
Dayton was shaking his head, staring into nothing. “I told Deams what my father did to me, and he said he believed me, but I don’t think he did. Otherwise he wouldn’t have sent me back … there.”
“Tell me about your father.”
“Do I have to?”
“No. But it might help me understand you better.” Brass sat forward. “We’re connected, you and me, Jerry—you said so yourself. I think you understand me—I needed to stop someone who was very smart and clever, who was taking victims. It’s my job to stop that kind of thing.”
“Sure. I … I was only mad at you because … I don’t mean to insult you, Captain.”
“No, Jerry. We can be frank with each other.”
“I don’t do well with … authority figures.”
“Like your dad?”
Dayton leaned his elbows on the table and put his hands on his face, looking out between his fingers, handcuffs jingling. He blew out a long breath. “Let’s just say he was a hard man to please.”
Brass nodded. “Yeah—I had one of those.”
“Your father was mean to you?”
“Strict. And like you said, Jerry, hard to please.”
“Not like mine, I bet!” He assumed a sterner posture, pointed across the table at Brass with the index fingers of his bound hands. “ ‘You’re a disappointment, young man, a disappointment.’” His eyes glistened with tears. “ ‘We give you everything, and every opportunity, and you keep disappointing us! You’re nothing but a weakling … a weak little girl. You know what weak little girls need, Jerry? Do you know what they need?’”
All the while the forefingers pointed and accused and waggled, and Jim Brass had no need for a court-appointed psychiatrist to explain the killer’s fetish for taking his victim’s forefingers as grisly souvenirs of his triumph over them.
The prisoner fell back in his chair, spent, the tears spilling, making wet ribbons down the narrow hawkish face.
“He beat you?” Brass asked. “On your … bare bottom?”
Dayton laughed bitterly. “Oh, is that what your ‘hard’ daddy did to you, Captain? You had it easy! Oh, but I had to bend over, all right … I bent over for Daddy, so many, many times….”
Brass frowned; Catherine and Nick had reported to him what the Sundown doctor had said about Dayton’s stories of sexual abuse.
“Your father … violated you?”
“That’s a nice word for it.” He sat forward and screamed: “He made me his bitch!”
Brass shook his head.
Then he said something he never imagined to hear himself saying, much less truthfully: “Jerry, I’m sorry for what you suffered.”
The killer’s father, Thomas Dayton, had been a pillar of the community for decades, with nary a whiff of deviant behavior. Not that that was unusual—some of the most important people had kinks buried beneath their decent surfaces; bigger the secret, deeper the cover-up.
And as Brass recalled Tom Dayton, from the few times he’d met the man—once at the mayor’s annual prayer breakfast—the detective suddenly realized that this heavyset white male had been the template for every one of CASt’s victims.
“Your victims,” Brass said. “They were your father.”
“Yes … yes. Those bastards, I made every one of them my bitch.”
“But you stopped. When you came back home, from Sundown. Did your father stop abusing you, was that it?”
“He did stop. I was too big. And, well … he knew what I’d done, after all; he was afraid of me, in a way … at least I had that much satisfaction. But they kept me on those meds, and I was like a dog with a shock collar, y’know?”
“Is that why you stopped, Jerry? The meds?”
“Maybe. And the doctors. I mean, I never came out and talked about what I’d done, not really. But like you said, I’m smart and I’m clever. I could find things out by just talking to them, hypothetically. And I came to learn something, from the therapy.”
“What was that?”
“That I couldn’t make it right, I couldn’t make what my father did not have happened, even if I made a thousand of him my bitches.”
“Did you ever think to do it to … him?”
“Captain, haven’t you been listening? Every one of them was him!”
“I mean … the real ‘him,’ Jerry. You never thought of killing him?”
“Killing Daddy?” Dayton blinked; he seemed confused. “How could I do that? He was my daddy. Didn’t you love your daddy, Captain?”
“I did, Jerry. I did. But even if killing a thousand pretend daddies didn’t help you heal, maybe … talking about it will be a start.”
“To you? You’re not a doctor!”
“Is that who you want to talk to, Jerry?”
Dayton snorted. “Not hardly. I can make them jump through hoops.”
“Then talk to me.” Brass shrugged. “Can’t hurt. Look, we both know you’re going away for a long time. You want it to be a hospital or a prison? Maybe I can help you choose.”
“Hospitals,” Dayton said with a derisive laugh. “I’ve already been down that road…. Do they let you subscribe to what you want to subscribe to in prison?”
“Depends on the facility. Did you say your father knew what you’d done? That you were CASt?”
“Of course he did.”
“How?”
“He was … bawling me out about something. He’d stopped doing the … act … with me, I was too big, too old, too much stronger than he was. But he still, you know … told me what to do, told me what a disappointment I was. So I’d had enough of that and said, ‘You better watch it, old man,’ but he just laughed at me. So I told him. Showed him.”
“Showed him?”
“The fingers. In the jars? I had four, I think, when I told him.”
“So he knew.”
“He knew, all right.”
“And he and your attorney made arrangements to have you put away, where the law couldn’t touch you.”
“Yeah. See, the old man thought you were getting too close. That you were going to catch me. He said you were a really good, smart detective, that you were from back east where cops were tough. And that’s one thing I agree with him on—you’re good. So is that guy Grissom.”
“Thanks. Was your father … upset with you, for what CASt did?”
Dayton closed his eyes. “He knew what I was doing, I think he figured out why I was doi
ng it, but the only thing he gave a damn about was the ‘potential scandal.’ You know—the shame? So, he put me in that … that hellhole till the heat blew over.”
“Then he took you out again, quietly.”
Rocking gently now, Dayton said, “Yes. It was voluntary committal, so that wasn’t hard.”
“Did anyone besides the doctors know you were getting day and weekend passes?”
Dayton thought about it. “Deams did, for sure; I mean, he helped the old man get me out—the doctors were against it.”
“But they didn’t know about your hobby?”
“Please don’t demean what I do by calling it a hobby, Captain. It’s a statement, and a kind of … catharsis.”
“Sorry, Jerry.”
“No, the doctors didn’t know I was CASt. I did tell them about what my daddy did to me, but I don’t think they believed me. Who would you believe? One of the biggest men in town, or his sick-in-the-head kid? Anyway, they just thought I was too ill to be outside yet—you know, until they had a better handle on what was wrong with me.”
Brass was putting certain disturbing pieces together. “And of course your father wanted you out as soon as possible, because he didn’t want the doctors to know the reason behind your illness.”
Dayton finally opened his eyes. He had a slightly startled look. “Is that why?”
Brass sighed. “Jerry, I appreciate your frankness.”
“I’ve been straight with you, haven’t I?”
“I would say so.”
“Have I earned the right to ask you a question, Captain?”
“Okay.”
“Were you the one?”
“The one … what?”
“I mean, you’re smart. Really good. But I always had trouble believing you were the, you know … one.”
Brass sat up. “I don’t know, Jerry. Honestly.”
Dayton sighed. Smiled. “Good. I wouldn’t have liked that.”
“Jerry, please explain what you’re talking about.”
Rubbing a wrist where the cuffs were chaffing, Dayton said, “Some cop knew about me. I mean, must have known, because the old man? For years he bitched about having to contribute to what he called ‘the widows and orphans fund.’”
Brass’s belly tightened. “What did you think that meant?”
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