by Alex Dolan
I remembered I should be defending myself against prosecution. Deny, deny, deny. “What do you mean, every time?” This came out coy.
“When I told you to talk to me, you know what I meant. No reason to dodge anything now. I caught you red-handed.” Leland drifted. His all-nighter must have got to him. “Ever wonder where that came from—red-handed?”
“It means you’ve got blood on your hands.”
“That would make sense.” He chewed his pinky in thought. “How long have you been doing this?”
I was ready to talk, but not to confess. “Doing what?”
“How many people have you killed?”
Not a squeak.
“Do you have any idea how long we’ve been trying to find you?” I did wonder—very much. “Roughly two years.” He could’ve earned a master’s degree in that time, and yet he chose me. “The way we’ve counted it, there have been nine unexplained deaths of senior citizens in the Northern California area. I’ll admit, I don’t know if this number represents your full portfolio, but I do know that all of those people suffered from terminal illnesses. They all died in their homes. They were unattended, except by whoever killed them. Big note with ‘DNR’ written on it.” He waved the book over his head. “Do Not Resuscitate—just like the good Dr. Holt suggests. In every instance, death came from an intravenous high-dose barbiturate. Thiopental and pancuronium. One-two punch.” He leaned toward me. “Did I get the number right? Nine?”
As I mentioned, he didn’t have the number right. He’d missed several clients in Southern California, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico. Twenty-seven clients. He had counted nine, and I didn’t even know if his nine matched mine. His lack of data boosted my confidence.
“It’s been more, hasn’t it? Doesn’t matter. We only need to get you on one count.”
He was right. What a goon I’d been. I let my guard down a little, and now I was screwed. With every twitch of my face, I was giving myself away. “We can figure out the full count later. Killer’s a killer’s a killer.”
I couldn’t imagine saying it out loud. I wouldn’t have confessed to myself in a locked closet back in Bernal Heights. I killed twenty-seven people. That phrase would never get its proper volume.
“I’m not a killer.” This just came out. He’d riled me. I knew I shouldn’t have spoken as soon as I heard myself. A second later, I thought, So that’s how people get caught.
Maybe I needed a lawyer, but I didn’t ask for one. Leland hadn’t officially read me my rights, because he hadn’t arrested me. But it was becoming inevitable. If I were an active participant in my own ruin, it would only go faster. I imagined how I’d look in my best suit, standing during the sentence reading. Momentarily, I indexed my wardrobe and chose a heather gray suit that hid my shoulders, softening me. Kevorkian got eight years, but he was a doctor and had a lot of good will behind him. The right legal team could paint me as a piranha and toss me in a dungeon.
“Does the name Nancy Donavan mean anything to you?”
Of course it did. Nancy was Kali’s first official client. Nancy had tightly wound ringlets. Her thick glasses prevented much direct eye contact. She was eighty-seven years old, suffering from delusions brought on by an inoperable tumor behind her right eye. She didn’t remember her family on most days. Nancy’s daughter and son-in-law brought her to live with them. I was queasy the whole time, and popped one of my own Valiums so I wouldn’t hyperventilate during the video good-byes.
I might not have had the gonads to go through with any of it, but Nancy guided me. She wanted it so badly. The whole family wanted it. Even with a house full of witnesses, it didn’t feel wrong. We bunched together, quiet as she drifted off on her side, mouth open in an interrupted yawn. Most of us wept, including me. I didn’t know what killing was supposed to feel like. I suppose I guessed it would feel like stealing. But when her fingers gave a final tremble, I felt like I had gifted her mercy.
“Did Nancy Donovan give you a taste?”
Yes, but not in the way he meant.
“What about Merrill Stromberg?”
Leland had done his homework. Merrill was client number twelve; probably number four by his count. She was younger than most. Younger than him. Forty-four years old and suffering from uremia. Accompanying kidney failure, uremia occurs when urea and waste products stay in the blood instead of being excreted through urine. It gave her a lot of bruising and bedsores, and she couldn’t hold any food down. She’d withered down to a stick. Uremia lowers the body temperature, and her body felt cold when I touched her. Merrill’s husband, Peter, sat with her and read Erica Jong poems until she fell asleep.
“You took money from her.”
“I did not.”
“You had to.”
Merrill came from a very wealthy family, old money New Yorkers who relocated to the West Coast. The Strombergs ran one of the more successful drugstore chains in the region. Leland Mumm assumed that a family of means would have naturally paid me for services. The truth was, she contacted me the same way everyone had. Some people sought me out because they didn’t want to be alone. Some because they didn’t want to botch the job. Some, like Merrill, wanted discretion.
“Nothing that you say or do will ever make that statement true.”
“That rhymed,” he said.
“Unintentionally.” I couldn’t ignore my bladder anymore. “I really have to pee.”
“Tough. Titty.” Leland meticulously intoned.
“I’m serious. You want me to wet your floor?”
“Go ahead. What makes you think this is my floor?”
“You want to humiliate me on top of everything else?”
“It won’t be the first time I’ve ever seen someone piss their pants.”
I tried to shame him. “Does it get you off?”
“A grown woman soaking her own crotch with urine? No, it does not. Nice try, though.”
“Have a modicum of humanity.”
“I’m not inclined to uncuff you.”
“You’re going to have to eventually.”
“If you’re looking for privacy, you’re not going to get it. I’ve lived with women, Kali. A little urine isn’t going to bother me. And don’t worry about the bed. I was going to throw it out anyway.” Leland walked around to the headboard and loomed over me. I tried to kick him, but my boot wouldn’t reach. Some of the sheets had bunched in the corner of the mattress. For a moment, I thought he was going to drape the sheets loosely over me for a modicum of privacy. Instead, he snapped them out from under me, swiftly as a magician doing a tablecloth trick.
Son of a bitch. He really wasn’t going to let me use the toilet. He wouldn’t even turn his back. So I opened up my bladder, locking hateful eyes with him. The mattress became warm and wet, and seconds later the dampness around my crotch made my underwear chafe like sandpaper.
Above me, Leland seemed satisfied. He excused himself and made for the bathroom, where he loudly emptied his own bladder into the toilet, flourishing it with a proud flush.
This was my breaking point, the final humiliation that cracked my will. I sobbed again, but this time without any restraint. I had no defiance left in me when he returned to the room.
Leland gaped wide when he yawned, like a crocodile. “They’ve got a few nicknames for you. Florence Nightingale is the one that stuck, but some folks call you the Night Nurse, and Belladonna.”
When I collected myself, I said weakly, “Why not Kali?”
“Not as fun for them.”
I paid more attention to my gritty crotch than to what I was saying. Coy evasion wasn’t working for me. Leland read my facial tics, and knew how to coax the truth out of me, even if it was just serving up yes-no questions and detecting when I was lying. Now I’d offered a tacit confession by not refuting the implication that I was Florence Nightingale or whatever the hell they wanted to call me.
Between the shame and the exhaustion, I stopped caring about my own safety. Leland had broken me. So instead of telling him to
lick his own balls, I started talking. “So, they think I’m a nurse?”
“We assumed you had some sort of training, but we weren’t sure how much. I knew you weren’t a nurse from the questions you asked about my medical records.”
“The questions I asked Dr. Thibeault.”
“She told you how to spot the scar tissue on my lungs. Someone who went to med school would have already known how to spot it.”
“Fair enough.”
“We knew you were a young woman and tall. Some witnesses pegged you going in and out of homes, and a security camera caught you in a parking lot in Orinda.”
He waited for a reaction, and I finally gave him what he wanted. “I can’t believe I missed those. I usually check.”
Leland seemed pleased I was opening up. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
I’d never felt so deflated and yet relieved that I could share the truth instead of concealing it. “What do you want to know?”
“I want to understand. I’m trying to figure out if you’re redeemable, or if I should just throw you to the lawyers and be done with you.”
“You haven’t already made up your mind?”
“This is a tricky crime to suss out. You could be trying to help people in your own misguided way. And you could be a full-tilt psychopath. I’m wondering which one it is.”
“What if I’m doing something courageous?”
“You’d like to think that, I’m sure. But tell me, where’s the courage in killing someone who’s mostly dead? Sounds like hunting at a zoo. It’s just target practice.”
An instinctive indignation released my combative streak. “The courage comes in defying an immoral law.”
“Then you could say there’s courage in every criminal, which there is, at some level. But it doesn’t make it legal.”
“If it’s the right transgression, it makes it moral. And that’s enough.”
He mocked me in a church voice. “If it’s wrong, I don’t want to be right!” His contempt ruffled me, but I didn’t have much strength to retort. If he unlocked the cuffs and I tried to punch him, my arms might swing as weakly as air guitar windmills. “See, this is the kind of logic that I’ve come to expect from the misguided. You’re twenty-six, old enough to know better, but still young. Idealistic and highly malleable. I get it—I was that age. But what you’re considering an immoral law has been part of mainstream morality since we’ve been making laws. It’s never been considered moral to kill another human being. You could argue that it’s the foundation of why we even made laws. So people like you wouldn’t go around on willy-nilly killing sprees.”
“It’s not a killing spree.”
“Quite right,” he considered. “A killing spree would imply the heat of passion. A rash, irrational act. That’s not you at all, is it? All of these were very methodically planned.”
“It’s not murder. None of them were.” There I went again, seeping out my confession.
“I believe that’s what you believe. That’s a good sign. That means you’re not a psychopath. Probably. These people make you feel something?”
“It’s mercy.”
“Listen, when you’ve got laws on the books as old as ours—I’m talking Hammurabi Code here, and even laws that were made before that—people created punishments when one civilian killed another. People don’t want to see people kill other people—it is an undeniable part of human morality.”
“It’s up to individuals to take action so people can identify what laws need to be changed. Remember slavery?”
Leland looked as if a balloon had just popped. Then he laughed with his head between his knees. “Oh, that’s good! You’re going to talk to me about slavery. All right, let’s see how bad you hang yourself.”
“Slavery was around for thousands of years, way before anyone from Africa ever got to America.”
“That’s right. But it was never considered a moral absolute. That’s what made it tricky. Slavery was an economic system that necessitated the violation of human rights. Some people knew it was inherently wrong. But as an economic system, it was open to different perspectives. On the other hand, when someone gets killed in civil society, everyone always gets their nuts in a bind.”
“It’s the same thing to me. Different ways to legitimize human suffering.” Not sure how much I believed this, and how much I was trying to push his buttons.
“You’re not going to sell me on your argument.”
I asked, “Do you feel like people in chronic pain have the right to die?”
“In fact, I do. That’s why we’re talking. That’s why you’re not in a jail cell yet.” His voice lost some of its amusement.
My adrenal surges ebbed, and I was left quaking and nauseous in their wake. Leland nursed his water. The talking was drying me out. Now that I’d unsuccessfully tried to link my work to the abolition movement, I wasn’t sure if I could even ask for more.
“You want more than a confession. Please tell me what it is.” My teeth chattered as I said it. Any answer to this would terrify me, and I shivered thinking of all the weird things he might do to me.
He propped his elbows on his knees. “You know what I find remarkable? That I’ve had you chained up here overnight and you haven’t asked for a lawyer. You haven’t even screamed for help.”
“I didn’t think anyone would come running. Maybe all the homes around here are empty, like that town in Nevada where they dropped the A-bomb.”
“No,” he shook his head. “You didn’t think that. You didn’t want anyone to come and save you.”
He didn’t sound anything like my mother, but it didn’t stop me from answering like a petulant daughter. “Think so?”
“Know so.”
“Why would I need rescuing? You’re a detective, right?”
“Indeed I am. But cop or no cop, I represent a threat to you. And I’ve done something completely unorthodox for the police. Namely, I’ve kept you captive. And you haven’t squealed for help the way anyone else might have.” He shot me another one of his puzzled stares. “That tells me you don’t want someone to come and fetch you.”
“And why not?”
“Any number of reasons. You might be used to being independent, so you might not be in the habit of asking for help. You might still think you can save yourself. Maybe you think I’m a psycho, and you’re worried if someone else comes into the scenario, they might get hurt too. But I think you have what the law calls mens rea, ‘a guilty mind.’ You know this is wrong, and you want to be caught.”
Though I surely lacked the strength to grapple with him now, I tossed out, “Why don’t you uncuff me and test the theory?”
“Listen to you now. No fight in your voice. You don’t even want me to let you go now. You wouldn’t know where to go if I did.” He was confusing me. In the pauses, his lips gently sucked at his water.
“So what do you want from me?”
He placed the glass by his ankle. His long fingers twiddled. “I want us to trade.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“You will.” He started again. “Kali, do you know why all this is happening?” No, I really did not know, and that was the worst part. “I wanted to give you a taste of captivity. How do you like it so far?”
My thoughts mixed a mob of voices into a babbling welter. Already I’d fantasized about how to hurt or kill Leland Mumm. California was a death penalty state. For the crimes I’d committed, a court would entertain life imprisonment. If I killed a detective, I’d get the needle. How was that for irony?
Leland continued, “This is just a taste. An amuse-bouche. A lot of people don’t get how bad it is when you lose your freedom. Here, you’re still in a warm house. We’re in a little chalet compared to where we could be. You don’t see any bars on the windows. Not here. Not yet. No guards, except me, and I’m a puppy compared to the folks in lock-down. And I haven’t given you roommates. I suspect you’re not the type of person who would warm to constant companio
nship in a locked cell. Granted, women’s prison isn’t as bad as being thrown in with the boys, but it’s no Magic Kingdom. And I’m guessing by the way you act, the way you dress—you’ve never come across ladies like this, unless you passed them in a bus station.”
He was getting to me. My wrist churned against the cuffs again, the steel digging into my open cuts.
“Now, you might be the sort of person who would want to end it, but it’s tough to kill yourself in prison. People are watching you all the time. Even if you could get someone to sneak in a razor or a rope, you probably wouldn’t have the privacy you wanted. Making a makeshift rope out of torn bed sheets? Tougher than you’d think, and it takes quality alone time to do it. Puncturing yourself with the corner of a bedframe—tough to pull off. Most likely you’d knock yourself out and be stitched up at the clinic. So you’d end up living a long, long and miserable, miserable life. Isn’t that what you’re trying to help all these people avoid?”
He was good with words. He might as well have been reading my tarot cards and narrating my future. My body should have dissolved into the mattress. I wanted to be invisible.
“That’s my future, then.”
“It could be.”
I hated myself for asking, “But?”
“If there was a way out, would you take it?”
“What’s the trade?”
“Freedom for a favor.”
That’s what this was all about. Offer a drink to the sweaty chick in the desert, just when the turkey vultures coast down for a sniff. All this time I’d been petrified this was going to end with parts of me packed in suitcases. Turns out I was more afraid of the shame and torture of prison. When it really sunk in, captivity terrified me more than death. Piss-stained, exhausted, and terrified, I would listen to any hypothetical.
Leland dragged his chair closer, near enough that I might lash out with a leg. But there was no chance I would pull something like that now, and he knew it. Dictators have been known to quell rebellions with an infrasonic “brown note,” a frequency so low it would loosen the bowels of an angry mob. Leland had neutralized my defiance with another form of self-soiling—my pee-bleached undies. This was what it felt like to be broken. It wasn’t the biological wear and tear he inflicted. Compared to what a lot of people endured in interrogations, I’d gotten off light. I still had all my fingernails, and he never went near my pelvis. He didn’t have to. Once I lost hope, he held dominion.