by Dan Wells
“I hear you’ve been terrorizing the kids at school,” said Dr. Neblin.
I ignored the doctor and stared out the window, thinking about Rask’s body. Something about it was . . . wrong.
“I don’t want you using my diagnosis as a weapon to scare people with,” said Neblin. “We’re doing this so you can improve yourself, not so you can throw your pathology in other people’s faces.”
Faces. Rask’s face had been smeared with the sludge—why? It seemed humiliating—something the killer had never been before. What was happening?
“You’re ignoring me, John,” said Neblin. “Are you thinking about the new murder last night?”
“It wasn’t a murder,” I said, “it was a serial killing.”
“Is there a difference?”
“Of course there’s a difference,” I said, spinning around to stare at him. I felt almost . . . betrayed by his ignorance. “You’re a psychologist, you have to know this. Murder is . . . well, different. Murderers are people like drunks and jealous husbands—they have reasons for what they do.”
“Serial killers don’t have reasons?”
“Killing is its own reason,” I said. “There’s something inside of a serial killer that’s hungry, or empty, and killing is how they fill it. Calling it murder makes it . . . cheap. It makes it sound stupid.”
“And you don’t want serial killing to sound stupid.”
“It’s not that, it’s . . . I don’t know how to say it.” I turned back toward the window. “It feels wrong.”
“Maybe you’re trying to make serial killers into something they’re not,” said Neblin. “You want them to have some kind of special significance.”
I ignored him, sullen. The cars outside drove slowly on the sheet of black ice that covered the street. I hoped one of them slid into a pedestrian.
“You saw the news last night?” asked Neblin. He was baiting me to talk by bringing up my favorite subject. I kept silent and stared out the window.
“It seems a little suspicious,” he said. “That reporter announced that he had a clue related to the killer, and then died just an hour and a half before he had the chance to reveal that clue to the world. It seems to me that he was on to something.”
Great thinking, Sherlock. The news at ten had made the same conclusion.
“I don’t really want to talk about this,” I said.
“Then maybe we can talk about Rob Anders,” said Neblin.
I turned back to look at him. “I wanted to ask who told you about that.”
“I got a call from the school counselor yesterday,” said Neblin. “As far as I know, she and I are the only ones he’s talked to. You gave him nightmares, though.”
I smiled.
“It’s not funny, John, it’s a sign of aggression.”
“Rob is a bully,” I said. “He has been since third grade. If you want some signs of aggression, just follow him around for a few hours.”
“Aggression is normal in a fifteen-year-old boy,” said Neblin, “bully or otherwise. Where I get concerned is when that aggression comes from a sociopathic fifteen-year-old who’s obsessed with death—especially when, up until now, you’ve been a model of nonconfrontational behavior. What’s changed for you recently, John?”
“Well, there’s a serial killer in town stealing people’s body parts. You may have heard; it’s been in the news.”
“Has the presence of a killer in town affected you?”
The monster behind the wall stirred.
“It’s very close,” I said, “closer than I’ve ever been to the killers I study. I’ll check out books and go online and read about serial killers for—well, not for fun, but you know what I mean—but they’re all so far away. They’re real, and their realness is part of what’s fascinating, but . . . this is Nowhere, USA. They’re supposed to be real somewhere else, not here.”
“Are you afraid of the killer?”
“I’m not afraid of being killed,” I said. “All three victims so far have been grown men, so I assume he’s going to stick to that pattern—that means I’m safe, and Mom and Margaret and Lauren are safe.”
“What about your father?”
“My father’s not here,” I said. “I don’t even know where he is.”
“But are you afraid for him?”
“No,” I said slowly. It was true, but there was something I wasn’t telling him, and I could tell that he knew it.
“Is there anything else?”
“Should there be?” I asked.
“If you don’t want to talk about it, we won’t,” said Neblin.
“But what if we need to?” I asked.
“Then we will.”
Sometimes therapists could be so open-minded, it was a miracle they kept anything in there at all. I stared at him for a while, weighing the pros and cons of the conversation I knew would come, and eventually decided it couldn’t hurt.
“I had a dream last week that my dad was the killer,” I said.
Neblin didn’t react. “What did he do?”
“I don’t know, he didn’t even come see me.”
“Did you want him to take you with him when he killed?” asked Neblin.
“No,” I said, uncomfortable in my chair. “I . . . wanted to take him with me, where he couldn’t kill anymore.”
“What happened next?”
Suddenly I didn’t want to talk about what happened next, even though I was the one who brought it up. It was self-contradictory, I know, but dreams about killing your dad can do that to you. “Can we talk about something else?”
“Sure we can,” he said, and made a note on his paper.
“Can I see that note?” I asked.
“Sure.” Neblin passed me his pad.
First reason: Killer in town.
Doesn’t want to talk about father.
“Why’d you write ‘first reason’?” I asked.
“The first reason you scared Rob Anders. Are there more?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“If you don’t want to talk about your father, how about your mother?”
The monster behind the wall stirred. I’d come to think of it as a monster, but it was just me. Or the darker part of me, at least. You probably think it would be creepy to have a real monster hiding inside of you, but trust me—it’s far, far worse when the monster is really just your own mind. Calling it a monster seemed to distance it a little, which made me feel better about it. Not much better, but I take what I can get.
“My mother is an idiot,” I said, “and she won’t let me into the back of the mortuary anymore. It’s been almost a month.”
“Until last night, nobody’s died for almost a month,” he said. “Why did you want to go in the back room if there was no work to do there?”
“I used to go there a lot, to think,” I said. “I liked it.”
“Do you have anywhere else you can go and think?”
“I go to Freak Lake,” I said, “but it’s too cold now.”
“Freak Lake?”
“Clayton Lake,” I said. “There’s a lot of weird people there. But I practically grew up in that mortuary—she can’t take that away.”
“You told me before that you’d only been helping in the back for a few years,” said Dr. Neblin. “Are there other parts of the mortuary you have an attachment to?”
“That reporter died last night,” I said, ignoring his question, “and we might get him—they’ll send him home for a funeral, of course, but they might send him to us first for embalming. I need to see that body and she’s not going to let me.”
Neblin paused.
“Why do you need to see the body?” he asked.
“To know what he’s thinking,” I said, looking out the window. “I’m trying to understand him.”
“The killer?”
“There’s something wrong about him and I can’t figure it out.”
“Well,” said Neblin, “We can talk about the killer, if that’
s what you want.”
“Really?”
“Really. But when we’re done, you need to answer any question I ask.”
“What question?”
“You’ll find out when I ask it,” said Neblin, smiling. “So, what do you know about the killer?”
“Did you know he stole a kidney from the first body?”
Neblin cocked his head. “I hadn’t heard that.”
“Nobody has,” I said, “so keep it quiet. When the body came to the mortuary the kidney was missing—everything else looked like it had been shredded, but the kidney had been cut off pretty cleanly.”
“And what about the second body?”
“He took the arm,” I said, “and the abdomen was slashed but not gutted—most of the innards were still inside.”
“And in the third he took a leg,” said Neblin. “Interesting. So the piled-up organs in the first attack were incidental—he’s not ritualizing the killings, he’s just taking body parts.”
“That’s exactly what I told Mom,” I said, throwing up my hands.
“Right before she threw you out of the back room?”
I shrugged. “I guess it is a pretty creepy thing to say.”
“What’s interesting to me,” said Neblin, “is the way he leaves the bodies—he doesn’t take them or hide them, he just leaves them out for people to find. That usually means the serial killer is trying to make a statement, so that we’ll see the body and get whatever message he’s trying to make. But if what you say is true, then he’s not displaying the bodies—he’s just striking quickly and fading out, spending as little time with his kills as he can.”
“But what does that mean?” I asked.
“For one thing,” said Neblin, “he probably hates what he’s doing.”
“That makes a lot of sense,’ I said, nodding. “I hadn’t thought of that.” I felt stupid for not having thought of it. Why hadn’t it occurred to me that a killer might not enjoy killing? “But he defaced the reporter’s body,” I said, “so he had some kind of motive there beyond just ending his life.”
“With a serial killer,” said Neblin, “the motive is very likely an emotional one: he was angry, or frustrated, or confused. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that sociopaths can’t feel—they feel very keenly, they just don’t know what to do with their emotions.”
“You said he didn’t like killing,” I said, “but so far he’s taken a souvenir from all three. That doesn’t make sense—why does he take things from an event he doesn’t want to remember?”
“That’s a good one to ponder,” said Neblin, jotting it down on his pad, “but now it’s time for my question.”
“All right,” I said, sighing and looking back out the window. “Let’s get it over with.”
“Tell me what Rob Anders was doing right before you threatened to kill him.”
“I didn’t threaten to kill him.”
“You talked about his death in a threatening manner,” said Neblin. “Let’s not split hairs.”
“We were in the gym at school for the Halloween dance,” I said, “and he was kind of bugging me—teasing me and knocking over my drink and things like that. So then when I was talking to someone, he came up and just really started making fun of me, and I knew the only two ways to get rid of him were to punch him or to scare him. I have a rule about not hurting people, so I scared him.”
“You don’t have a rule about threatening to kill people?”
“It hadn’t come up yet,” I said. “I have one now.”
“Who were you talking to?”
“Why does that matter?”
“I’m just curious about whom you were you talking to.”
“Some girl.”
The monster behind the wall growled, low and rumbling.
Dr. Neblin cocked his head. “Does she have a name?”
“Brooke,” I said, suddenly uncomfortable. “She’s nobody. She’s lived on my street for years.”
“Is she cute?”
“She’s a little young for you, Doctor.”
“Let me rephrase that,” he said, smiling. “Are you attracted to her?”
“I thought we were talking about Rob Anders,” I said.
“Just curious,” he said, making a note on his pad. “We’re about done for the day anyway. Is there anything else you want to talk about?”
“I don’t think so.” I stared out the window; cars passed carefully between the buildings, like beetles in a maze. The Five Live News van crept slowly past headed east—out of town.
“Looks like he scared them off,” said Neblin, following my gaze.
He was probably right . . . wait. That was it. That was the piece I’d been missing.
The killer scared them off.
“It’s not a serial killer,” I said suddenly.
“It’s not?” asked Neblin.
“It’s all wrong,” I said, “it can’t be. He didn’t run away afterward—he displayed the corpse, just like you said, by smearing that sludge all over him. He wasn’t just trying to cover up the news, he was trying to scare them away. Don’t you see? He had a reason!”
“And you think serial killers don’t have reasons.”
“They don’t,” I said. “Search through every criminal record you’ve got and you’ll never find a serial killer who kills someone just because they’re getting too close—most of them go out of their way to get more media coverage, not less. They love it. Half of them write letters to the press.”
“Doesn’t fame count as a reason?”
“It’s not the same thing,” I said. “They don’t kill because they want attention, they want attention because they kill. They want people to see what they’re doing. Killing is still the root reason—the basic need the killers are trying to satisfy. And this guy has something else. I don’t know what it is, but it’s there.”
“What about John Wayne Gacy?” asked Neblin. “He killed gay men because he wanted to punish them. That’s a reason.”
“Very few of the men he killed were actually gay,” I said. “How much about him have you actually read? The gay thing wasn’t a reason, it was an excuse—he needed to kill something, and claiming that he was punishing sinners let him feel less guilty about it.”
“You’re getting a little overexcited, John,” said Neblin. “Maybe we should stop now.”
“Serial killers don’t have time to kill nosy reporters because they’re too busy killing people that fit their victim profile: old men, little kids, blond college students, whatever,” I said. “Why is this one different?”
“John,” said Neblin.
I could feel myself getting light-headed, like I was hyperventilating. Dr. Neblin was right; it was time to stop. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. There would be time for this later. Still, I felt a buzz of energy, like the sound of rushing water in my ears. This killer was something different, something new.
The monster behind the wall sniffed gruffly at the air. It smelled blood.
7
I first noticed the drifter by the movie theater downtown. Clayton gets its fair share of drifters—people passing through looking for work, or food, or a bus fare to the next town over—but this one was different. He wasn’t panhandling, and he wasn’t talking to people. He was just looking. Watching. Nobody watched people that much, and for that long, except me, and I had serious emotional problems. I decided that anyone who reminded me of myself was worth keeping an eye on—he might be dangerous.
My rules wouldn’t let me follow him, or even look for him, but I saw him a few more times over the next few days—sitting in the park watching kids slide down the plowed-up snowbanks in the parking lot, or standing by the gas station, smoking, watching people fill up their tanks. It was like he was evaluating us, checking us all against some list in his head. I half expected the police to come pick him up, but he wasn’t doing anything illegal. He was just there. Most people—especially if they didn’t read criminal profiling books for fun, lik
e I did—would just pass right over him. He had some kind of strange ability to blend in, even in a pretty small place like Clayton County, and most people just didn’t notice him.
When the news reported a burglary a few days later, he was the first person I thought of. He was alert, he was analytical, and he’d watched our town for long enough to know who was worth following home and robbing. The question was, was he only a burglar, or was he something more? I didn’t know how long he’d been in town—if he’d been around for a while, he might well be the Clayton Killer. Rules or no rules, I needed to see what he did next.
It was like standing on the edge of a cliff, trying to convince myself to jump off. I followed my rules for a reason—they helped keep me from doing things I didn’t want to do—but this was a special case, right? If he was dangerous, and if breaking this rule helped stop him—and it was really a pretty minor rule, after all—then it was good. It was a good thing to do. I wrestled with myself for a week, and finally rationalized the idea that it was better, in the long run, to break this one rule and follow the drifter. I might even save somebody’s life.
The day before Thanksgiving I had no school, and though Ted Rask’s body came into the mortuary that morning, Mom refused to let me help, so my day was free. I went downtown and rode around for an hour until I found him, sitting on the bus bench by Allman’s hardware store. I went across the street to Friendly Burger and sat in a window booth to watch him.
He was the right size to be the Clayton Killer—not huge, but big, and he looked strong enough to take down a guy like Jeb Jolley. His hair was brown and long, about chin length, and he wore it shaggy. It wasn’t such a strange look in Clayton County, especially in the winter—it was freezing cold, and long hair helped keep your ears warm. He’d have done better if he had a hat, but then I suppose drifters can’t be choosers.
His breath came out in short, hazy puffs—not the long, lazy clouds of the other people on the street. That meant he was breathing rapidly, which meant he was nervous. Was he looking for a victim?