by Dan Wells
“Not even John?”
“Nobody,” said Marci, and her mom looked at me helplessly.
“I’m sorry, John; she’s been like this all morning. Don’t worry, she’ll come out soon enough. You want a piece of bread?”
“No thanks,” I said, being careful not to make a face. “Just tell her to…” I paused, desperate to talk about the killers. There’s two! I wanted to shout. There’s been two all along and we didn’t see it! But her mom was right there—I couldn’t say anything crazy. “Marci! We need to talk!”
“Not today, John,” Marci called back. “Can’t you give it a rest?”
Her mom smiled at me sadly. “I’m sorry, John. You know how she gets.”
I took a deep breath. “Yeah, I know. Tell her to call me. I don’t know.…”
“She needs some time alone,” said her mom, leading me back downstairs, “but it won’t be long until she needs you again. Don’t worry, she’ll call you whether I tell her to or not.” We reached the kitchen, and she picked up a pair of dirty, leather gloves. “I need to get the compost tilled in before it gets too much colder. You sure you don’t want a snack or a drink or anything?”
“I’m fine,” I assured her. “I can show myself out.”
She nodded and went out the back door, and I walked slowly down their dark hall toward the front. It was cold enough now that the front door was finally closed—the first time I’d actually seen it shut. I put my hand on the knob, then froze as I heard a burst of static from the nearest room.
“Officer Jensen, you there?” It was his police radio. I heard the creak of a chair and a rustle of newspaper, then Marci’s dad spoke.
“Yeah, Steph, I’m here.” Stephanie, I thought, from the police station.
“We just got a call from another searcher, out by the lake. They found another old fire pit with some bones in it, and some burned-up gloves—sounds like a bigger glove remnant than we got with Coleman. Moore wants you to go check it out.”
Interesting, I thought. I crept closer.
“How old?” asked Officer Jensen.
“Pretty old,” said Stephanie. “More likely Pastor Olsen than the sheriff, assuming it’s even legit. Anyway, bag it all and bring it, and we’ll see if we get a match.”
“Will do, Steph. See ya.”
“See ya.”
I heard the faint clink of buckles, probably Officer Jensen pulling on his police belt. I couldn’t open the door without him hearing and I didn’t want him to know that I’d been listening, so I slipped out of the hallway and waited in the den, holding my breath. Jensen’s footsteps creaked across the floor, into the hall, and then the front door squealed on its hinges. He stepped outside, and the door slammed shut behind him. I took a breath, waited for several seconds, then went to a window and watched him as he walked to his car, got in, and drove away.
Why is the Handyman destroying the hands? I wondered.
I opened the door and walked to my own car. It was cold, and I shivered, wishing I’d brought a jacket. I turned to look up at Marci’s window. The blinds were closed tightly. I told Marci that everything was lost, that our whole profile was worthless, but I was wrong. We were right about the religious messages, and we were right about Astrup being next. We just didn’t take it seriously enough—we didn’t realize that the Handyman would fight back when we messed with her plan. Meier didn’t die because we built the wrong profile, he died because the profile was right but we used it wrong. I turned away from the house, still shivering, and got into my car.
Two killers: the Handyman and the suicides. I breathed deeply, trying to focus. Two demons; it made perfect sense for Nobody to bring backup. I told her I was going to kill her—she’d be stupid to come alone. So instead she grabbed her friend the Handyman and brought him along, so he could distract me while Nobody hunted. Why didn’t I see this before?
I shook my head. Everything I thought I knew about Nobody—the entire profile—was actually the Handyman. That put me back to square one on Nobody, but the profile of the Handyman was still good. If I can find him, he’ll lead me to her. I just need to focus.
* * *
The doorbell rang three times before I got up to answer it. I opened the door and froze.
It was Father Erikson.
“Hello, John.”
He found me! My heart jumped into my throat, and I looked desperately at the window, as if expecting to be tackled by a swarm of police. There was nothing. I took a step back, poised to bolt.
“That was quite a scene at the dance,” he said. “I’m told you saved the day.”
So that was it: my big show at the dance. The whole school saw me talking to Ashley. Of course it would get onto the news. I hadn’t even thought to watch, I was too distracted with Brooke and Rachel and Marci. I glanced at the blank TV, eager to turn it on and see what they were saying, but it was midafternoon; the noon show was over, and the evening news wouldn’t be on for a few more hours. I sighed.
“You put that together, huh? There’s a lot of kids named John, you know, it wasn’t necessarily me.”
“Not necessarily,” he said, “but more likely than not. I took a guess and came over.”
Then he didn’t know for sure until I—
“Don’t worry,” he said, as if reading my thoughts. “I recognized the car outside. I would have known it was you whether you opened the door or not.”
I nodded, keeping my face calm, but inside I was terrified. If the news story is enough for Father Erikson to put it together and find me, who else is going to find me? Will Nobody put it together as well? The police tried so hard to keep my involvement with Forman quiet. Would this blow my cover?
I pushed those thoughts away and looked at the priest. Deal with him first. “What do you want?”
“You lied about talking to a counselor. There’s only one at the hospital, and she’s never heard of you.”
I shrugged. “It got you off my back. And it’s a good thing—what would have happened at the dance last night if you’d called the police and I wasn’t there to help?”
“Technically nothing, from what I hear,” he said. “The bomb was fake. That doesn’t make you any less brave, of course, but it made your attempt to defuse it a lot less vital.”
I smiled thinly. “Fair enough. You gonna turn me in now? The Homecoming Hero?”
“I don’t…” He shook his head. “Is your father here?”
“Nope.”
“When will he be back?”
“I’ve been wondering the same thing for nine years.”
The priest nodded, as if that explained something important. “And your mother?”
“Grocery shopping.”
He nodded again. “You know, I’m not sure I understand you, John. I talk to a lot of troubled cases at the church, and all of them lie now and then, and all of them break promises, but you … You’re the only one I’ve met who’ll lie to my face and scare me to death, and then turn around and risk his own life to help somebody.”
“I’m full of surprises.”
“That you are,” he said, nodding. “Your theory about the Handyman, at the very least, seems to have been proven entirely accurate.” He shifted on his feet, looking over my shoulder at the room beyond.
“Why are you here?”
He nodded slowly. “Same thing as before. I want you to talk to my friend.”
“Because you think I’m going to hurt someone.”
“I think you would benefit from a talk with a therapist.”
My laugh was thin and hollow. “How many lives do I have to save before you stop thinking I’m a bad guy?”
“We had a deal, John—”
“The deal is off,” I said firmly. It’s time to end this, I thought. Act forceful—don’t leave any room for argument. “You go to the police, and you tell them I talked about killing someone two weeks ago. They’ll ask why you didn’t report this earlier, and you’ll sound like an idiot when all you can say is ‘he asked me
not to.’ They’ll ask if you have any evidence beyond your own word, and you won’t. They’ll ask if you’re aware that John Cleaver risked his life to save a building full of people, and you’ll be officially out of options.” I folded my arms. “The police like me a lot, but you go ahead and try, if it makes you feel better.”
I watched him carefully, keeping my face firm and impassive. Did it work? Did he buy it? If he calls my bluff and goes to the police, I could actually get in a lot of trouble. I had to hope my confidence convinced him.
He stood on the landing, watching me silently. After a moment he nodded his head. “I see.” He paused. “I see.” He looked me in the eye, the corners of his mouth turned down, his eyes dull. Sadness. “Just … be careful, John. You’re getting into something very dangerous, probably more dangerous than I’m even aware of. If you need anything, please call me.”
I said nothing.
He turned and left.
* * *
Sheriff Meier’s body arrived at the mortuary a few days later, on Monday afternoon, and I got home from school just as Mom and Margaret were getting started. I washed up and joined them, cleaning the body and setting the features, smearing the wounds with Vaseline. While we worked, I thought about Nobody, trying to piece together what few clues I had about her. She kills young girls. She makes it look like suicide. She … That was it. It was all I knew. There had been no fingerprints at the scene but the girls’ own; no sign of a struggle; no evidence that any of the deaths had been anything but suicide. I supposed it was possible the police knew something they weren’t making public, but any secret evidence they had probably still pointed to suicide. Otherwise Officer Jensen would be a lot more protective of his daughter.
As I worked on the body, I tried several times to roll it over and work on the back, but every time I did, Mom found something else to do first: there was still dirt in his hair and we had to wash it again; the string in his jaw was too tight and it was making the nose looked pinched and unnatural. None of it was true—he looked fine. She was stalling.
“We’re going to have to roll him over eventually,” I said. “We can’t embalm him until we seal up the back.”
“I know,” she said, grimacing. “I just don’t know if I can handle it. I’m pretty desensitized to this stuff, but still—David Coleman had how many wounds in his back? And how many more is this one going to have?”
I shrugged. “There’s no getting around it.”
She sighed and shook her head. “Let’s do it, then.” We stood on the body’s left and lifted it up, flopping it gently down onto its face. We stopped in surprise, mouths open, then bent over the back to look more closely—it was heavily mangled, but not nearly as bad as Coleman’s had been. I started counting, and Mom grabbed the file from the side counter.
“Twenty-two, twenty-three…”
“Thirty-four,” she said, looking up from the folder. “That’s even less than Robinson.”
“And Pastor Olsen had thirty-two,” I said. “They were all pretty much the same, except Coleman. Why was he different?”
“That’s not our concern,” said Mom quickly, snapping the folder closed and setting it aside. “We’re here to make sure Sheriff Meier looks as good for his viewing as he did in life—that’s it. We are not investigating this.”
“But it’s important.”
“Not for us,” she said again, picking up a jar of Vaseline. “Let’s just be grateful it’s not as bad as we thought, and we won’t speak of it anymore.”
I started to protest again, but she glared at me, and I stopped. Margaret glanced at us from her side table, said nothing, then turned back to her work on the organs. I closed my mouth and went to work on the perforated back.
Three victims, all nearly identical, with a victim in the middle that breaks the pattern. It wasn’t just the eyes, it was the back wounds as well—they weren’t part of a rising trend, they were an anomalous spike. How does it fit?
What does it mean?
I reviewed the facts as I packed the stab wounds with cotton, struggling to make sense of the chaos. The Handyman kills, he gets angry, he takes it out on the back. Something about Coleman made him far more angry than any of the others. So what made him angry?
The obvious first guess was Coleman’s sin—he was the only one killed for looking at porn, underage porn specifically, and that might have special significance for the killer. Was he traumatized in his youth? Was he abused or molested? But this was an ageless demon we were talking about, not a human—did demons have a youth to be traumatized in? Could they even be traumatized at all?
The more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed. The Handyman had already reacted to the porn by taking Coleman’s eyes, and he had done it as coldly and clinically as he had the hands and tongue. The rage in evidence on Coleman’s back was separate, and sparked by something else. As odd as it seemed, I had to consider the possibility that the two anomalies in Coleman’s corpse were unrelated. Something made him so mad that he lost control more than he ever had before. An external force? Something in his personal life? I shook my head, bewildered. I didn’t even know if he had a personal life.
We finished packing the stab wounds and smeared them with Vaseline, covering them tightly with bandaging tape and rolling the body back over. Mom began to prepare the embalming fluid, and I used a scalpel and hook to open the corpse’s collar and pull out a vein. We slit it open, inserted the tubes, and turned on the pump.
Marci and I had already talked about the back wounds weeks ago, sitting in the office during the mayor’s funeral. We’d hypothesized that the cause of the anger was the killing itself. Something about the act of killing enrages him. But then why kill at all?
We know why he kills, I thought. He wants to punish the guilty. But what prompts that desire? What mechanism clicks inside of his head and says, “now is the time to kill”? Each victim had been fifteen days apart, except for the last one: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Tuesday. Did the days mean anything, or just the time between them? Was the most recent killing a day early, or was the daily pattern simply a coincidence?
I looked at the calendar on the wall, a large poster of a beach resort with all twelve months printed in tiny blocks at the bottom. Mom watched me, probably guessing that I was thinking about the killings, but I ignored her and stepped up to the wall, pulling off my rubber gloves and tapping each death date with my finger. August 8, August 23, September 7, September 21. That didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, so I began looking for other dates, grabbing a pen off the counter and marking everything I could think of. Here’s the attack at the dance. Here’s when Coleman was fired. This is when they found the pastor’s hands, and this is when they found the mayor’s.…
Saturday, September 4, he burned the mayor’s hands, and was almost caught doing it. That was just three days before he turned Coleman’s back into hamburger. It was the closest relationship between any of the dates I’d marked.
I stared at the calendar, my mind racing, kicking myself for not seeing it before. He was almost caught—is that what made him mad? But no—the Handyman had written letters to the paper and then forced Ashley to read another letter at the dance. It wasn’t the revelation of evidence that made him angry, so it had to be something else. Some other aspect of the burning. What did he do that he didn’t have to do? He didn’t have to run. He could have stayed by the fire and waved as the hikers went past, and no one would have suspected a thing. They only saw the lumps because they got up close and poked through the fire, and they only got close because his running made them suspicious. He didn’t have to run, but he did. Why?
It all came back to guilt—he ran because he didn’t want anyone to see what he’d done. He felt guilty; he felt ashamed. He killed because his victims were sinners, but killing was also a sin, and he knew it. That’s what made him angry enough to stab the bodies thirty times, and that’s what made him go out and burn the hands in a ritual cleansing.…
&nbs
p; A ritual.
What if he wasn’t finished?
The Handyman’s attacks showed strong signs of ritual behavior—the way he planned them so carefully, the way he killed so precisely, and the way he posed and displayed the bodies. What if this ritual extended long after the kill, to a ceremonial destruction of the victim’s last remaining pieces? He’d done it with the pastor and with Coleman, and he’d tried to do it with Mayor Robinson, but the hikers had stumbled in and scared him away before he could finish. He used that ritual to absolve his guilt and diffuse his rage, and without that emotional release all his rage would have continued building and building until it exploded on Mr. Coleman in an animalistic fury. Sixty-four stab wounds. It made sense.
It almost made sense. From what Officer Jensen had said, the mayor’s hands and tongue had still been destroyed by the fire—there was no real flesh left, just charred bones and lumps of what used to be meat. What else was there to do? A prayer he hadn’t said? A curse he hadn’t spoken? What was different about that day’s ritual?
The gloves.
Stephanie had talked about gloves—remnants of burned gloves that had been in the fire with Coleman’s hands, and now also in the fire with the pastor’s hands. There had been no gloves in the fire with Mayor Robinson’s. That was the missing piece—that was the difference that had made his next attack so violent: he hadn’t been able to burn his gloves. But what did the gloves mean? He wore gloves when he killed, so they were evidence, but a ritual like this implied far more than simply burning evidence. He destroyed his victims’ hands because they represented the sins that made his victims guilty; if he was equating hands with sin, it was no great stretch to think that the gloves represented his own hands, and his own sins. Over and over, kill after kill. What had he said at the end of his letter? The city will be purified by fire. He was using the fire to burn away his sins, and that one time he hadn’t been able to do it. For all his bluster, for all his talk of righteous judgment, he knew deep down that he was just as guilty as we were. Maybe more so.
And that is the gap in his armor.