by Robb T White
‘Wouldn’t Burchess know a friend from an enemy if that’s the case?’
‘You’d think so,’ she said. Maybe the victimology the agents were conducting would answer the question. If Burchess was confronted by someone and recognized him too late as an enemy, he would have drawn a weapon only if he thought he was in danger—or if the killer was disguised in some fashion, made to seem harmless.
The pathologist took a brief backward glance at the body he had just sewn up. ‘At the turn of the last century, a Massachusetts physician named MacDougall conducted a rather macabre experiment with his deceased elderly patients in an old folks’ home. He weighed them after death. The first patient lost twenty-one grams exactly.’
‘The presumptive weight of the soul,’ Jade said.
‘Yes,’ Dr. Peaspanen said. ‘My theistic friends hate it when I inform them that only the first patient MacDougall weighed lost twenty-one grams. Another lost weight and continued to lose weight. One patient lost weight and then gained weight.’
‘I’m not sure I see your point, Doctor.’
‘The man on that table is big, a mesomorph, not just your average wellnourished male in necrosis. He’s big enough to eat apples off your head, Agent Hui, if I may borrow an old colloquialism from my grandmother. If an adversary approached him in a menacing fashion, why would he allow himself to succumb to a person’s attack, much less be disarmed, all while standing in hip waders? It hardly suggests a surprise attack by your killer.’
‘I agree with you there, Doctor,’ Jade replied.
The murders of his two companions happened moments apart but at some distance from each other. A gunshot would have been heard, so she agreed with the doctor on the murder weapon. It’s possible whoever was killed second might have seen the killer pull out his slingshot or seen his friend drop into the water and not know what had just happened. The mind has a way of processing the bizarre to make it conform to normality.
‘Wouldn’t he have cried out?’ Peaspanen asked her, probing.
‘I’m not sure what was or wasn’t possible,’ she said. ‘There is one thing that suggests a connection between the killer and the one victim he tased.’
‘Assuming he was tased,’ the pathologist corrected. ‘What might that be?’
‘He knew him,’ she said. ‘He wanted him to know. It suggests a prior relationship between killer and victim.’
‘Is that your theory of the moment?’
‘Call it a working hypothesis. When will I receive a copy of the written report?’
‘I’m a fast worker,’ he said. ‘I’ll have all three prelims done by five o’clock this afternoon.’
‘Thank you, Doctor,’ she said. ‘One more thing, if I may?’
‘Yes?’
‘Didn’t your MacDougall continue his experiments on fifteen dogs and discover no weight loss right after he’d already claimed the soul’s weight at twenty-one grams?’
Peaspanen cracked a wide smile for once. ‘I do believe you’re right, Agent Hui, but one has to take the good doctor’s word for the accuracy of the findings.’
Out in the parking lot, her white blouse was stuck to her back. The broiling heat of a Southern city was numbing in its intensity. She drank long sips from every water cooler she had passed since she woke up that morning.
The doctor was right about Burchess in the man’s physicality. He was possessed of an imposing male physique. She’d seen other dead men on slabs and was no longer taken aback by ejaculate that oozed from a flaccid penis to puddle on the steel table. Burchess’s tattoos weren’t very informative: his name in Gothic script across his upper back, the names of old girlfriends, she assumed, in smaller Italic script on shoulders and each calf. The freshest one, wife Evie’s, on his right bicep. The Road Runner adorned one pec while the Christian fish occupied the other. Beneath it she read a passage from a psalm: “What man shall live and not see death?” Indeed. Nothing like the life maps and metaphorical windows tattooed on a Russian zek’s hide, however, or some Brand members she’d interviewed in prisons. In death’s repose, the tattoos seemed like afterthoughts, the aura of menace, romance, surliness, bravado all gone when the last breath leaves.
As she sat in her baking car waiting for the air conditioning to kick in, the sun having moved higher and stripped the protective morning shade, Jade refocused on her image of Coy Burchess fishing. It didn’t sit right that he would allow a man of any size to slip up on him or take him by surprise. If his attacker was someone he knew and didn’t fear—someone he was on friendly terms with—then being struck twice by 50,000-volt impacts would have rendered him helpless.
Dr. Peaspanen couldn’t say whether the killer held their heads under water to facilitate drowning or simply let nature take its course. Only Burchess had the compression marks. The broken trigger finger. If he had a grudge against Burchess, not the others, he might not have wanted to risk more exposure by prolonging his time spent with the other two.
Again, the audacity of it was nearly overwhelming. Three men at one time, none vulnerable or physically disadvantaged. Most killers—nearly all serial killers—were basically cowards, ambushers of women and young girls, and small women in vulnerable positions such as asleep or blindsided. Six-foot-nine-inch Edmund Kemper known as ‘The Coed Butcher’ was a mamma’s boy. The killers of small males or boys followed the same modus operandi as with female victims. Burchess, however, was a knuckle-dragger, a violent bully. Plenty of malignant narcissists out there killing, even some who considered themselves charmers or ladies’ men—but she had never heard of a real Dr. Lecter with an IQ comparable to John Stuart Mill.
She was certain of one thing at this point: nothing so far existed to make her believe in Smiley Face killers, unless that tree stump came back with signatures and a confession. How did her boss expect her to liaise with veteran state investigators on that pretext? It was ludicrous, embarrassing, and it added one more push toward resignation from a career she wanted to love and toward one she secretly despised: lawyers, the unacknowledged eleventh plague of the Bible.
She headed back to her motel room for a quick shower and a few minutes of quiet meditation. Deep breathing, yoga—these helped and she knew herself well enough to know they could bring her out of this funk. Gilker wanted a report; they all wanted reports. It was a Kafkaesque world where dark, crazy things happened and people wrote reports in jargon on machines that converted thoughts into bits of reproducible light.
Chapter 6
WÖISSELL WAS IN ONE of his more contemplative moods. The highway miles were ticking past while the earth spun on its axis in blackest space in an orbital speed of 67,000 miles an hour—fast enough to reach the moon in four hours. Everything is falling toward the sun—me, this car, the road I’m traveling on. Earth’s gravity is pulling us all into its core every second of existence.
He wasn’t sure which interstate he was currently on. Sometimes he would take one and follow it until he came to another one and take that. A junction was an opportunity, not a direction; he could choose one and follow it until it was time to pull over, get gas (the food truck was a hog), and find a motel. He had no plan at the moment, but it would happen that the bliss would wear off like a drug, and he would get that itchy restlessness in his veins again.
He was OK with randomness. Planning only happened when it had to. He knew he had to pick a town in the meantime, but every library in every Podunk town had computers for public use. He’d picked Fayetteville because of a fourday Roots Festival. He wasn’t fond of shit-kickin’, floor-stompin’ music with the same three themes involving loss, crying in beer, and rain, but a raucous set by Zorro and the Blue Footballs made him reassess his prejudice. At one point, the lead vocalist, a slender bearded man, dry-humped a life-sized plastic statue of Jesus with a fake blunt sticking out of its mouth. That wasn’t the country western he expected when he pulled his truck into the slots designated for vendors. But the kind of music didn’t matter—rockabilly, bluegrass, chamber music,
rap—as well while there were tourists and transients moving about for him to gaze upon at selection time. His canteen wagon belonged. No one suspected a man selling hot dogs to be plotting murder.
When he started trolling, he used highway rest stops for scouting purposes. He taped a home-made banner across the front announcing some charity benefit and let the people come to him. He even had Highway Patrol for customers. It was like banging a stick against a swill bucket; the hogs came running up to him. He reduced the cost of his menu to create goodwill and they came even faster—but they went back to their cars and hit the road before it was possible to make the right selection. He was a wolf leashed to a cement block with jackrabbits bouncing all around him but none to be caught.
There was another risk he later learned to avoid: you needed a vendor’s license. When he was asked why his license wasn’t taped to the window outside Salt Lake City, he said this was his way of ‘paying it forward’ and had a ready-made sob story of a mother with breast cancer, or some disease of the month, who had recovered, ‘Bless His holy name, Our Lord Jesus,’ and he just wanted to give back to the community, blah-blah. He was less disciplined then, too eager. The patrolman gave him a break but instructed him to get a license; the officer provided directions to the nearest chamber of commerce. Charley thanked him, blessed him, and apologized. Then he put three states’ distance between him and that rest stop. Never again, so stupid. He hadn’t been in Utah since except to pass through it on his way to other destinations.
The first thing he did when he arrived in a strange town was to head for the municipal building to obtain a vendor’s license under one of his aliases, pay the small fee, and only then, after getting the lay of the land, he would begin the pleasant task of finding the person or persons who belonged to him.
Wöissell was a long way from those days. He found it added something to adopt a role like the stuttering sandwich man; acquiring two extra scalps sweetened the deceit. He’d saved Burchess for the pièce de résistance.
He had watched Burchess fishing from a slope for a half hour, knowing everything that was going to happen before he moved. He’d chosen an expensive hunter’s aluminum slingshot with a paracord-wrapped handle and flat leather pouch for the ball, knowing it was notoriously hard to aim unless you had strong hands and wrists. Wöissell was capable of using weapons of opportunity, such as knives, spoons, pencils, rocks, anything solid, or sharp-edged for ramming an opponent’s head into. The power he had developed in his fingers and wrists gave him confidence. Holding a slingshot steady from a target’s head at thirty feet was hardly a feat to brag of.
Wöissell stopped buying those plastic hand springs because he snapped them too easily. He kept a box of foam, thick-spring grips in his canteen along with forearm grips and an ergonomically designed sports grip made for a world-class archer that flexed the fingers. This exercise worked both muscles that flexed his middle and tip joints in precise ways so that the flexor digitorum superficialis and the profundus tendons glided between these major tendons and maximized strength. It almost never happened, but he was careful not to shake hands with anyone. That person would likely remember the differences in feel.
Like Mr. Tough Guy, formerly of Fayetteville, Arkansas …
He kept the Taser in his pocket as he approached. The big redneck was bent over his tackle box, cursing a snagged lure, spewing a litany of unimaginative curses. Burchess was oblivious to Charley in disguise: Razorbacks ball cap, faded Levis, fishing rod and tackle box filled with stones for sound effect, just another fisherman.
‘Hey, y’all like to try one of these here Rebel Wee-Craws?’
Charley couldn’t resist. He’d been hearing that annoying accent for weeks.
‘No, got my own,’ Burchess grunted, still trying to free the snag.
‘These work real good,’ Wöissell said.
Burchess looked up for the first time.
‘I fuckin’ told you I’m good, now fuck off, man, before I stick one of them Wee-Craws up yore ass—’
A hint of recognition. The prognathous brow furrowing to show his dim bulb of brain, trying to identify what was so familiar about the stranger. Priceless, recalled Wöissell, just priceless. Speeding down the interstate, he was mentally back on the riverbank with the hulking bully.
‘What the motherfuck you think you’re doin’?’
Burchess’s puzzlement immediately gave way; the alpha-male was back in place. Charley remembered Burchess looking around, no doubt hoping his two companions could share in the fun coming up.
‘Your friends can’t join us, I’m afraid,’ Wöissell said.
‘Why not, asshole?’
‘They’re doing the dead man’s float,’ Wöissell said. He pointed in a direction around the bend where the sluggish current moved.
‘What the fuck are you talkin’ about?’
‘No more t-talk, sss-sir,’ Wöissell lisped. He stepped toward Burchess, caught flat-footed, and clipped him under the jaw with the Taser.
Burchess staggered backwards, a clumsy jig, arms flailing like a man falling out of an airplane, and then he lunged toward Charley. Burchess wasn’t going down even though his legs couldn’t find a purchase and his head wobbled from the shock. Charley saw the small gun coming up in plenty of time. He side-stepped, wrapped his own right hand over the gun and gave it a quick jerk, popping Burchess’s finger.
He couldn’t match Burchess for brute strength, but his training paid off. Never make the mistake of standing there gloating, watching the damage you inflicted on your opponent, his instructors taught. Never stop fighting: an old lesson. He wasn’t going to be the one photographed on a shitty riverbank in Arkansas.
He imagined the fly-blown corpse of Coy Burchess lying half in water, speckled with maggots like confetti, eggs in every orifice. A useless life, a life unworthy of being lived, so serving as host for insect larvae made him something useful in the world at last. The notion pleased Charley.
In his youth, Wöissell had watched indifferently as his peers, scions of rich New England families, chose business, finance, politics, management. If you were born to die—if, as he knew in the deepest cockles of his heart life was meaningless, then you had no other choice but to do what he did: exist in the violent interface between what the fairytale theists called good and evil, alone, content with passing time in his own way until he, too, marched off the edge into the void with millions of others. Meanwhile, have some fun, ya’ll.
The sign ahead said McKees Rocks. He was traveling north on Interstate 79. Pittsburgh was six miles farther, but he preferred the bland, anonymous hotels of America’s freeway system. Blending in was a 24/7 discipline.
He swung off the nearest exit and aimed for one of the motel signs pitched high overhead on stilts. A shower, a drink, some low comedy on the human condition on CNN. He’d fall asleep thinking about the riverbank replaying scenes, turning his mental camera lens this way and that to savor each moment. He never took trophies. As long as his diamond-sharp memory remained intact, he would always have trophies for viewing at his leisure.
The Indian couple were so dark-complected they looked stained with mahogany and polished to a shine except for their gleaming teeth behind the lobby desk. He thanked them and avoided a prolonged chat by pleading road exhaustion; they were curious about his sandwich truck, the very thing he hoped to avoid. He drew from his stock of prepared stories for this kind of curiosity while they told him about a son in Princeton and a daughter who had just returned to Mumbai to be married. Their new son-in-law was from Madras and well off; the man was proud of the marriage he had arranged for his daughter. They were good Americans, they said. They believed in democracy without sacrificing an iotum of their belief in a caste system.
‘Yes, I see that,’ Wöissell said and smiled big. He wondered if he ought to consider other nationalities for variety’s sake.
The pleasant couple sidetracked him from a riverbank reverie. Showered and resting atop the stiff covers, he recalled an
event from his early manhood, a full year before he commenced his exploits on the road. When he was still a student at his third and final university before flunking out that winter, he found himself defending the Untouchables—the street cleaners, the latrine cleaners, and those who handled the bodies of the dead, renamed the Dalit as a measure of India’s political correctness in the face of world scorn, to a snobby visiting professor of comparative literature with a string of honorary doctorates. He was at a party and overheard the professor expressing superiority of the Vedas to the gospels. Wöissell confronted the man while he was surrounded by adoring grad students, the alumni hosts, and other sycophants; he twirled a wine glass by the stem, spilling some expensive sparkling wine on his guests’ carpet and crossed a leg over the other, exposing black socks in sandals. Wöissell hated him on sight with his sanguine complexion and cropped Van Dyke.
‘Indians are by far the worst, most hypocritical human beings on the planet and their Vedas are lying shit,’ Wöissell said to him, cutting off the middle of the man’s sentence.
‘W-what, did you say to me, young man?’
He asked the professor if he knew that a crime is committed against a Dalit, by a non-Dalit every sixteen minutes; if he knew that every day, more than four Untouchable women are raped by Touchables; if he knew that every week, thirteen Dalits are murdered and six Dalits are kidnapped. That was the year a 23-year-old woman was gang raped and murdered in Delhi. He told him over 1500 women were raped, ‘which means, you fathead, only ten per cent of rapes against Dalits get reported, and over 600 were murdered.’
A grad student with a fringe of Amish beard tried to interpose. Wöissell brushed him off and stood his ground. ‘That’s just the rape and butchery.’
Wöissell went on, ignoring the taps on his shoulder blades and the hands trying to pull him away from the honored guest. ‘Not the stripping and parading naked, the forced shit-eating—literally, you pompous moron—and the seizing of land, the social boycotts, the restriction of access to drinking water.’ Wöissell was fuming now, as he was pulled toward the door by several males and ejected, his jacket thrown after him into the hallway. ‘A Dalit Sikh who had the gall to report the men who gang-raped his daughter had both arms and a leg hacked off!’
