Perfect Killer

by Robb T White

  The lawyer in her said there was no point in seeking motive. You fed that to jurors because the average person always wanted to know why. ‘Your job is to prove it, not say why he did it,’ they taught her class in Criminal Law. Still, it bothered her.

  She woke from a bad dream last night when she thought he was roaming the halls, looking into rooms and wards for her. She jolted awake, teeth clenched, pain shooting through her ribs and collarbone. She had a feeling he was different from all the others in the VI-CAP database in that respect, too—egoless, a wraith moving soundlessly over the land, stopping here or there to destroy a human being for a reason that might be trivial, might be profoundly disturbed.

  The doctors forbade her reading anything for another week. She left the Tractatus beside her bed. Maybe somewhere in there was an answer to the forces that drove him.

  Chapter 35

  WÖISSELL HAD BEEN HOME for three weeks. News of the hunt for an FBI agent’s assassin was tapering off. As far as he could tell, the search was still concentrated in the Midwest.

  His father’s dotage had worsened and there was a family meeting scheduled to determine whether it was time for hospice. Fred, his stepmother, and Franny all thought it for the best. He held out against them and made it clear he wouldn’t go along with it.

  ‘Let him die upstairs in his bed,’ Wöissell said. ‘He hasn’t got that long to go.’

  Fred, who had been avoiding him ever since the legal papers arrived, said from halfway up the banister, ‘He needs to go bye-bye, Charles. A morphine drip is the best thing. Listen, I know a nurse who can turn that little old stopper just a pinch counterclockwise and he’ll be in heaven with the angels singing hosannas next to the throne.’

  ‘Why don’t you get one of your strippers to do it?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, she used to be a stripper—’

  ‘Is she the same one who got our stepmother to sign that certificate of independent review to petition a change in Grandad’s trust?’

  ‘Charles, I swear to God, I didn’t know a thing about it! The first thing I heard was when Franny called me up about it. Some technicality about “breach of fiduciary duty,” whatever, that just came up in the review. Her husband filed the petition. She’s the one you need to talk to.’

  Wöissell didn’t say anything. He had lost sleep every night since he made it back to Providence, almost ten pounds lighter, sporting a beard. His Tourette’s was back under control but the meds were increased and he was falling asleep in the middle of the day. That nervous tic was flaring up again, a rapid blinking, and the suicidal ideation he had fought off in his twenties was preoccupying his waking moments. He had told his stepmother it was the change of seasons, the autumn allergens. She accepted that in the same way she’d have accepted the winged monkeys of Oz at the dinner table. She was always half in the bag nowadays.

  But Fred trying to stick his snout into the trough at his expense was predictable and, unless that petition had legs, he’d put it in the queue of things to be concerned about later.

  The little agent, the FBI woman, was on his mind more and more. He had fought black belts with less difficulty than she had given him. He admired her pluck. Most men would have tried to escape topside at the first opportunity. She hung in there, looking for a way to land a kick to his scrotum. He should have killed her, made sure of her, but he had no idea whether there were more agents coming down the ladder any second.

  Someone on that boat might have seen him dockside and considered him a trespasser, called the police, but there, too, the feds wouldn’t give a rat’s ass for the penny-ante murder of two locals; neither of them brought him the same amount of joy. He had not even had time to arrange the scene before she surprised him. The thought he might have been hunted by the dark little agent he’d mistaken for a Latina until the online Youngstown Vindicator named her and the agent Silva. How could the FBI have picked up his trail? Visions of FBI agents swarming his house, guns drawn, ordering him out through a megaphone, hands in the air, his capture a fait accompli, and a lurid tabloid story. No, he wouldn’t go out like that, not like some ass-brained fool in a bad cop movie.

  He knew her toughness. He didn’t hold back; he broke bones. He’d find out what he could as discreetly as he could. If she thought he was part of her job, like some plumber with a blocked toilet, he might show her how dangerous he was.

  ‘Oh, Ty-rone, brother dear,’ Freddie sang out from upstairs, ‘I wonder if you could give me a hand with dear old Dad. It seems he shit himself in his bed again. We’re between nurses again, don’t you know.’

  Wöissell breathed deeply, steadied the shaking in his hands. One hundred trillion cells in the human body. Ten times as many micro-organisms in the human GI tract. Ten trillion galaxies in the known universe. One hundred octillion stars—no telling, really. How insignificant one life is or a million lives. A wandering black hole could suck this planet into its maw and the only thing anyone on Earth would realize is a sudden feeling of their muscles being massaged before the big blackout.

  Life and death are one thread, the past is prologue; the same line viewed from different sides, according to Lao Tzu. So why isn’t everybody out in the street killing like maniacs?

  ‘I’ll be right up,’ he called out.

  Chapter 36

  THE FBI’S RESOURCES ARE impressive, not just its world-famous forensics lab, and have been from its inception under the aegis of J. Edgar Hoover—or J. Edna, as his dress-wearing, late-night attendance at exclusive New York parties as ‘Mary’ yet remains a titillating part of its founder’s mythology. One story recalls how an agent had accidentally spilled ink on Hoover’s Persian rug in his office. By Monday morning that rug had been replaced with a duplicate flown in from the Middle East. Ostensibly, not even Hoover noticed the off-stitch a rug weaver must include so as not to offend Allah with a work of perfection.

  Jade’s wounds were healing and the opioids decreasing, which allowed her more mental acuity, but she found a depression settling in at times. She read the Tractatus in spare moments but found the logico-atomistic theory of how human beings know things epistemically ungraspable. She called Holland and asked him to put in a chit with DC for a couple of items to help her comprehension. One was a black vinyl album by a Finnish composer who put the Tractatus to music in 1989. The other was a short film based on the book by Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács.

  ‘Try Amazon,’ Holland told her.

  It gave her pause to think she and her attacker were connected through philosophy, as if he had left a sick aura behind through his touch. The deeper she got into it, the less confusing it began to seem, and its author deserved kudos for loving the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, a poet she adored along with the mystic Rumi.

  She never forgot what Jung had written. “I exist on the foundation of something I do not know.” Wittgenstein seemed to be saying something similar about language and its tenuous connection to reality. What symbology of the seeing eye made the killer want to do something so horrific and taboo as that? She thought of a favorite Tagore line: “I can see nothing before me.” Nor I, she thought.

  Her circadian rhythm had been off ever since she left the hospital for the rehab center. She was seeing two specialists at St. Elizabeth’s, and between the MRIs and PET scans, she was weary of waiting rooms and antiseptic hallways that reminded her of the dying going on behind the walls. Had the beating changed her psychologically? She worried constantly it had. She knew some things would be permanently different besides the scars—for one thing, she’d have to learn how to hold things differently with fingers that were broken and knitted along the fissures. The doctors reassured her that her constitution was healing properly, one even complimented her on having a superior genetic mapping that enabled such rapid healing.

  Gilker stopped by in the morning to ask her to take some psychiatric counseling. He told her it was completely normal after a trauma like hers.

  She offered him coffee, which he declined; s
he took the card he offered and told him she would give it some thought. His look implied he’d note in his report her refusal. She said she was being fitted for dentures, a bridge replacement for her lost front teeth. She’d apparently swallowed them during her fight and washed them down with blood. She didn’t remember.

  Gilker asked if she was sleeping OK.

  ‘Like a newborn,’ she replied and remembered not to smile; it would look grotesque.

  When she walked him to the door, she noticed her knees were shaking. She’d never had that kind of reaction before. She didn’t think of telling him that she had to fasten restraints to tie her hands down to keep from thrashing about from the nightly terrors.

  Her phone trilled.

  ‘Hey, you.’

  Cee Shaughnessy. She expelled a deep breath of relief.

  ‘Look, I can be there in four hours. I’ve got free time owed me and I have to use it or lose it.’

  ‘Cee, I’m fine. I really am.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ Shaughnessy said. ‘I can hear it in your voice.’

  Jade laughed. ‘It’s just from the missing teeth, my sore throat. I’m recovering. The doctors want to clone me. They say I shouldn’t be healing this fast.’

  ‘It’s not your body I’m worried about.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘I don’t want to intrude,’ Shaughnessy said. ‘But I’d like to see you.’

  ‘I promise to call you as soon as things settle down,’ Jade said.

  ‘I’ll hold you to that, babe.’

  She went back to Wittgenstein and read The totality of true thoughts is a picture of the world, placed a bookmark inside the page and set the book on the coffee table, grabbed a sweater, and dragged one of her kitchen chairs out to the tiny balcony of her motel suite. She watched starlings roosting in a barren field across from busy Mahoning Avenue explode upwards in a cloud and form a soundless black ribbon, first like pixels forming an image on a TV screen, and then a revolving Mobius strip flung skyward before it dissolved into a thousand black fluttering specks. She could almost pick the minute when the traffic lights synchronized to allow for crosstown traffic to flow unimpeded late at night.

  She had a secret mantra that she whispered to herself for courage in moments of despair and she said it now, her breath and the words disappearing into the dusk, unheard by anyone, but nonetheless a real fact, or, as Wittgenstein might have it, a state of affairs. Being alone, she wondered if her career had cost her her husband, children, friends, a stable life or whether these were the culture-driven expectations for all professional women whose careers were their lives. She was never sure she wanted what her life made impossible for her to have.

  When she was a girl of fifteen, she saw a gentle neighborhood cat being ripped up by two loose black Labradors with matching collars. She chased the dogs and brought the bleeding cat in and covered it with a blanket, but she knew the animal was so badly hurt it would die. When Cee asked her why she gave up a comfy law career for this life, she wasn’t honest. The real answer had more to do with that cat being mangled on a pleasant Sunday morning while she was watching television inside the house. When she found the dogs’ owner, she told him what happened, and he slammed the door in her face and called her a racist slur.

  She closed her eyes and imagined facing the sandwich man in the darkened stateroom below decks. She circled him. This time she was the attacker. She took him down and then put an arm lock on him while he tried to reach her with his deadly hands. She raked her fingers down his face across his eyeballs. Again and again, she inflicted damage, drew blood, broke bones, and watched herself perform one submission hold after another, choking him out until he thumped the deck like a fish, begging her to cease.

  She felt eyes on her. A man watched her from his own balcony across the way. The glowing tip of his cigarette revealed he was ignoring the no-smoking policy. She aimed a finger gun at him. He raised his hands in mock surrender and flicked his cigarette into the parking lot below. ‘Gotcha,’ she said. She meant the sandwich man, not the smoker, and when she looked again, he was gone.

  A specter from the dark side of her mind mocked her. ‘That was your pathetic imagination. This is reaaallll …’

  He lunged, she awoke with a cry, the bedsheets soaked with the sweat of her fear.

  Give in to fear, or quit the Bureau. She’d die first.

  PART 4

  Chapter 37

  Providence, RI

  WÖISSELL WAS IN DISTRESS. He would never panic. That wasn’t his nature.

  His source for the fake ID papers he used in the past was named in a Providence multiagency task force sting that rounded up a network of fences, thieves, drug dealers, and car jackers. What worried him wasn’t the names and indictments against the thirty-one people charged in last night’s Journal, but the fact that he was supposed to be meeting ‘Juggalo’ Chad in two hours. Big fish ate little fish, but little fish traded in for bigger fish.

  Before he became addicted to the Insane Clown Posse, Chad Burroughs was known around Providence’s sleazier neighborhoods as Chad the Fish or ‘Mackerel’ Chad because he had a pair of bulging eyes. He was a small-timer but his contacts for IDs and licenses were first-rate and he refused to let Charley deal directly with his source. Chad always claimed he used an internet company that originated in China for all his work.

  Charley realized he was growing paranoid the longer he remained in town. He blamed that little FBI agent. Nothing was making sense. He wondered if dementia was beginning its little dance.

  Chad told Charley not to worry over the phone. He said his charge was for receiving stolen property, a bullshit bust, not manufacturing illegal identity cards.

  ‘Can you get me papers?’

  ‘No sweat,’ Chad said. ‘But, look, I got some things to handle right now.’

  ‘One driver’s license for now,’ Charley said. ‘You can get the other stuff later.’

  ‘I’ve got one I started but the dude didn’t have the money—’

  ‘Chad, just bring it.’

  ‘It’s an Iowa BMV. The chip and magnetic stripes are coming with the new issues.’

  ‘That’ll do fine.’ He noticed a trickle of blood flowing down his wrist.

  ‘For a, you know, emergency order, I’ve got to charge more,’ Chad said.

  ‘Under the bridge,’ Wöissell said.

  Under the bridge meant the Providence River pedestrian bridge tomorrow at two.

  ‘This is the best you can do?’

  Wöissell looked at the driver’s license again, turning it over in his hand, as if that would improve the quality. It was a Xerox job, and not even a good one at that. He’d shaved for his photo. It looked as if the plastic had been laminated over the paper and heated with a steam iron. Some of the letters were streaked, illegible.

  ‘Yeah, man,’ Chad said. ‘I told you it was old-school, you know. Take it or leave it, dude. Three-fifty. Man, why we have to meet way the fuck out here instead of the diner?’

  Wöissell handed him the money.

  While Chad was hefting the envelope of bills, Wöissell hit him in the testicles. He did a casual 360, like boxing a compass, to see if anyone had noticed.

  He put his foot on Chad’s throat and smothered the gagging noise. Chad curled around his leg like a snake in the road with its back broken. Wöissell stomped his temple. Bye, bye, Chad. Wöissel looked to see if his boot had left an impression—no, good. He stooped low, well hidden by Chad’s car, leaned over Chad and drove his fist with middle knuckle slightly extended into Chad’s throat for the coup de grâce. The hyoid cracked like a Thanksgiving wishbone.

  Bundling Chad into the front seat of his car, he tossed a baggie of marijuana he’d taken from Fred’s room onto Chad’s lap and stuffed the envelope of money under the seat. Slumped back against the seat rest, he looked like someone napping. Wöissell took the sunglasses out of Chad’s pocket and adjusted them over the dead man’s face. There, a nice touch.

 
Wöissell walked away but felt sick in his stomach, as if strangers’ eyes were boring through the back of his head. By the time the Asian Uber driver dropped him off a couple of blocks from his house, his hands shook and facial tics distorted his face.

  Fred was coming down the stairs when he entered the house.

  ‘Whoah, better take your meds, little brother,’ he said. Fred paused midway in his descent, unsure, as if Charles was a bomb about to explode.

  Squeals, screeches, a hideous cacophony of noises erupted Charley could not control.

  ‘Jesus, you’re gibbering like somebody at a Jehovah’s Witness meeting.’

  He passed Fred, careful not to brush his shoulder. He might kill him on the steps.

  Safe in his room, he collapsed on the bed. Charley knew the deck was stacked. It wasn’t his body’s rebellion he feared but his mind slipping its moorings before his time.

  That bitch, that agent took away his confidence.

  Wöissell never hesitated once he emerged from the hospital after his coldwater drowning. He began training in martial arts as soon as his ravaged lungs recovered. He dedicated himself to one thing: killing. As many people as he could drag into the darkness as he could before the end came.

  Intense exercise helped the Tourette’s symptoms. He combed through The Yellow Pages for gyms. He avoided franchises like Gold’s, and those that looked like some yuppie’s tax write-off. Some half-page ads featured women with toned bodies and men with exaggerated muscles.

  He noticed only one on the west side. The neighborhood lost its claim to gentrification and had slumped back to poverty. He called and spoke to the receptionist. She gave him the information but he hung up when she asked for his name.