Every Wicked Man

by Steven James

  Then the girl turned and stared out the window momentarily before leaving to watch the cartoons that were playing on a television at the far side of the room.

  I paused the video.

  Rewound it to the spot where she looked out the window.

  Zoomed in.

  Yes, it was indistinct. Yes, it was tough to see.

  But yes, someone was there.

  Because of the faintness of the image, it was impossible to verify, but the person appeared to be of a similar build to the man who’d watched Jon Murray die. Without granting too much credence to speculation, I started with the premise that it was the same person.

  Whoever it was, he’d waited out the woman’s death and stood by watching that little girl try to awaken her dead mother.

  I felt a cable of rage tighten inside me.

  I was going to find this man and I was going to make him answer for what he was doing.

  But first, to track him down, I needed to discern how the young mother’s death and Jon’s suicide were related to each other.

  Victimology was once again the vital artery that connected the different aspects of the case. I just needed to figure out what these people—who didn’t appear to have anything in common—had in common.

  I went back over the previous videos and found that, yes, there was a window visible in the background in two more of them—the hanging and the death by bleach. And behind the glass, in each video, an observer stood. In the case of the man who hanged himself, the outline of the figure was evident in a house across the street.

  DeYoung had asked me if the observer might have intended to get captured on the video of Jon’s death, and I’d expressed my doubt about that. Now, I realized that his intuition might have been correct.

  I began pulling up everything I could on the suicide victims who’d died under the indurate eye of this nameless observer.

  28

  7:31 P.M.

  “My mommy and daddy, they hurt people.”

  “They hurt people?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do they hurt people, Emily?”

  Silence.

  “Emily, why would you say your mommy and daddy hurt people?”

  “’Cause I seen ’em. In the basement. That’s where they take ’em. That’s where they do things to ’em.”

  * * *

  +++

  Timothy still had another forty-five minutes or so before he needed to leave to meet up with Julianne at the river.

  In truth, he was nervous about finding out from her if he might have been responsible for Miranda Walsh’s disappearance—well, her murder—and he needed something to distract himself from thinking about all that. So he looked again at the opening scene of his work in progress.

  Since he wrote intuitively, allowing the narrative to unfurl as he was writing it rather than trying to storyboard it or plot it out beforehand, he wasn’t exactly sure where the story was heading.

  For him, part of the adventure of writing a novel was seeing the new directions that the story took as it emerged, and then following the twists and turns to their logical conclusion—even if that ended up being a place you never would’ve anticipated the book would go when you first set out to write it.

  Which was what almost always happened with him.

  As Robert Frost wrote, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”

  So it was for the poet.

  So it was for the novelist.

  Timothy liked that opening line: “My mommy and daddy, they hurt people.”

  But where would it lead? Where would it take him?

  He often found that writing freehand in a journal rather than typing helped him uncover the story, one word leading him to the next.

  And so now, that was what he did.

  * * *

  +++

  Detective Gary Hendrix shifted in his seat and watched the tawny-haired eight-year-old girl sitting across the table from him.

  “Tell me what you saw, Emily. Tell me what happened.”

  “They bring the people in the side door. Over by the garage. Daddy carries ’em. Mommy holds the door. Then they go downstairs.”

  “You’ve seen them do this?”

  Emily nodded. “Sometimes I play down there. One time I was there the whole time when it happened, and they didn’t even know.”

  Gary felt his heart squeezing tightly in his chest. “You were in the basement?”

  Emily nodded again. “Under the steps. Back in the corner. That’s how I seen ’em bring the boy down without anyone knowing.”

  Every one of the victims had been drugged before they were killed. Muscle relaxants, not enough to stop their hearts. No, the victims were conscious when it happened, they just couldn’t move. Couldn’t try to get free.

  “Can you tell me what happened that day? What you saw?”

  Emily was quiet for a long time before she finally said, “They hurt him.”

  Gary wasn’t sure he should be pursuing this line of questioning without a child psychologist in the room. No, no, of course he shouldn’t. But, although they had Emily’s mother in custody, her father was still at large. The psychologist was on her way, but this was time-sensitive, and he didn’t want to wait any longer unless absolutely necessary.

  “How did they hurt him, Emily?”

  She stared at the table. “Daddy used the hammer.”

  That was consistent with the wounds found on the body.

  “Did you see your mommy and daddy bring someone to the basement earlier tonight? Before the police brought you here?”

  Emily rubbed her fingers up and down the sweating Coke can that sat in front of her, the one Gary had gotten for her when they first came into the room, the soda that she hadn’t tasted yet.

  “It’s cold.”

  “It was in the machine.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “They brought her down.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I was hiding. I’m a good hider.”

  “I’m sure you are.”

  Emily took a drink of her soda, then set the can down slowly.

  “Daddy got out his hammer. When they weren’t looking, I snuck upstairs. That’s when I called the number.”

  “911.”

  Emily nodded. “Mm-hmm.”

  “And why did you call the number?”

  “’Cause I like Elena. She’s nice.”

  “You’re a very brave little girl, Emily.”

  “Is she okay? Is Elena okay?”

  A squad had been in the neighborhood and had made it to the house less than four minutes after the call came in. But it hadn’t been soon enough.

  Gary couldn’t bring himself to tell Emily. He searched for a way out of the question.

  “She’s dead,” Emily said. “Isn’t she? Like the others?”

  Okay, definitely out of his league. He needed that child psychologist here before he went any further in this direction, but he needed to be honest. He needed to tell Emily the truth.

  “Yes,” he said. “Your babysitter is dead.”

  * * *

  +++

  And so, that’s how it was so often when Timothy was working on a book: the characters would speak to him.

  Listening to voices.

  It was how he made a living.

  It’s how you make a killing.

  “No,” he said. “That wasn’t funny.”

  It’s how you ended up in the White Shirts Place.

  Timothy wasn’t sure how much of the material for his novels came from his imagination and how much came from his memory.

  Who is Elena?

  Who is Emily?

  Who are you?
/>
  “I’m no one.” Cognitive impairment was one of the symptoms of Morgellons, but he reminded himself that he had not suffered from that. “I’m not in the story. I’m the one making it up. I’m in the real world.”

  The real world is a comfortable illusion.

  Life imitates art.

  No. Art imitates life.

  Well, either way, fiction and reality—they were not such distant cousins.

  A car. A house. A garage. A basement. Most people in New York City didn’t have them, but his books had sold well enough for him to live nearly the same as he would have if his home were in the suburbs somewhere.

  And yet, Timothy almost never went into his basement. He avoided it just as much in real life as Emily did in his imagination. She chose never to go downstairs ever again. He ventured down only when absolutely necessary.

  You are Emily.

  “No no no no. I’m a man. She’s a girl.”

  You were a child once.

  “A boy.”

  That doesn’t matter.

  Yes, it did. It did matter.

  And so, since Timothy was who he was, a man who’d been a boy and not a girl, he could write about a boy coming home to his father after a fight at school, about a boy whose dad told him he needed to grow up and not be a pansy, needed to learn to fight back.

  It didn’t mean it was real. It didn’t mean it’d ever happened.

  He could write about that.

  Or about how a father slapped his son and kept doing it harder and harder in order To Teach Him a Lesson, and how the boy didn’t want to fight back and also didn’t want to turn away because it was his dad and he wanted to be brave and not let him down.

  Or about the tears that the boy cried when he was alone in his room, and about how badly he wanted to make his father proud and wanted to love him and wanted to run away from him and never ever ever ever see him again, all at the same time.

  Or about how his dad hurt his mom. About him punching her in the face and then laughing at the way she would cower when he raised his fist again. He could write about that. Or about how the boy wanted to hurt him for that, and especially for making her do those things with him in the basement.

  And that’s what you did.

  “No.”

  You wanted to hurt him. Wanted to kill him because—

  “No!”

  Yes. You killed him that day when you two were out on the river. You pushed him over the side of that rowboat, and when he tried to get back into it, you hit him in the head with the oar. You had to do it three times before he finally stopped trying, stopped moving. And then he went under the water and didn’t come up again. He was your first one.

  “That isn’t true,” Timothy protested. He was shaking his head defiantly. “That’s just a scene from one of my novels. That’s from Cold Clay.”

  Life and art.

  Art and life.

  Imitating, becoming each other.

  As far as Timothy knew, he hadn’t seen his dad since he was seven, ever since that day when the police came to the house. Ever since they started asking the questions. Ever since his mom was arrested and taken away.

  He had no idea if his dad was alive or dead, now, all these years later.

  An overactive imagination. That’s what you have, Timothy. An overactive imagination.

  But how much of it was memory and how much of it was just a writer’s vivid imaginings?

  But maybe it’s not overactive after all. Maybe your mind thinks about what you do in real life and then separates it from what you imagine just enough so you can’t tell what’s real and what’s not anymore.

  “Julianne is real. She’s going to help me.”

  Help you what? Help you kill? That’s what she offered to do, right?

  “She said she would help me find out the truth.”

  But only if she could watch you kill, photograph the bodies.

  “You’ll see. It’s going to be different now, now that she’s helping me.”

  Hemingway once said that writers should write what they know, and since then, books on writing and the instructors at writers’ conferences had been parroting back the same advice.

  On the one hand, it made sense since you have to tap into your own experiences, at least somewhat, in order to tell a story, in order to make one up. How else could you do it? How else could you possibly make it work?

  Writing what you know lends a certain authenticity to your writing, but on the other hand, you also have to branch out, enter the world you haven’t yet experienced for yourself, or your work will read tame and fenced in and small.

  Your dad is gone. He’s dead and gone. You took care of him, alright. You taught good ol’ Dad a thing or two. You learned your lesson about how to fight back, learned that lesson really well. You’re an apt student, Timothy. As it turns out, you learned an awful lot from your father.

  Then came the foster families, and by the time his mother was eventually released from prison, he was twenty years old and she had no desire to see him again.

  And that was okay with him.

  Because of the things he knew.

  She was found in a bathtub with her wrists slit two weeks after she got out on parole, and he always wondered if she just hadn’t been able to figure out a way to kill herself in prison, or if maybe she found that being out of prison was too terrifying or overwhelming.

  Or maybe his dad had tracked her down and made it look like a suicide.

  Timothy put his writing aside and looked at the clock.

  8:12.

  He was supposed to meet Julianne at nine. That gave him nearly fifty minutes to get to the dock where he’d arranged to see her, where he would find out if he was guilty of the things he knew he was capable of.

  Even with traffic, leaving within the next ten minutes or so should give him enough time to make it.

  He would see what she had to say and then decide what to do.

  With her. What to do with her. You’ll need to decide what to do with Julianne Springman.

  “I won’t do anything.”

  She’s dangerous. Take a knife. Just in case you need it. Or better yet, a letter opener.

  Timothy wasn’t going to, but when he went to get his car keys, he noticed the steel letter opener on his desk and slipped it into his jacket pocket before he left to speak with the woman who photographed the dead.

  29

  After nearly an hour, I still had nothing specific to link the suicide victims, even after carefully comparing their locations and the dates and times of their deaths.

  Three states. Nothing, as far as I could see, that the victims had in common.

  Though the face was indistinguishable, upon further investigation I noticed him scratch his jaw with his left hand at least once in each video—a mannerism that, although by no means definitive, was distinctive.

  Mannie had said to remember death, and in this investigation, that was all too easy to do. Did he say that because that’s what these videos were a way of doing? Were the deaths related to him and his escape?

  I wanted to know more about his background.

  It took a little work, but I was able to dig up that he was from the Gambia. Apparently, he’d traveled to the United States a week before an African warlord attacked his village. The villagers held them off with arms and mercenaries provided from one of Blake’s front companies.

  Mannie’s wife was saved.

  Her name was Hope.

  However, later, according to the information we had, on the way to the airport to flee to the States, she was killed.

  So maybe that’s why he was so committed to helping Blake—a sense of thankfulness or indebtedness for the weaponry and manpower that had helped to initially protect his wife.

  Although that seemed like a possibility, it was
in the realm of motives and there was no way to verify it. Still, it was helpful background information to give us the context to understand Mannie’s past and his loyalties.

  Whatever Mannie’s involvement and motivation, this was clearly a lot bigger than just the senator and his son. From all indications, someone was convincing men and women to kill themselves in graphic and disturbing ways and then standing by and watching it happen.

  Why these people?

  Why were they chosen?

  And, of course, who was this observer?

  Unless they weren’t chosen. Unless they did the choosing. Maybe he didn’t find them. Maybe they found him—or them. Maybe there’s more than one observer after all.

  We needed a tox screen from each of these victims.

  I put a request through to learn if there was Selzucaine in any of their autopsies, then contacted DeYoung to see if I could get more agents on the case. I tried Greer’s number, but he didn’t pick up. I’d left him a voice message earlier, so I decided not to leave another one now.

  I returned to the videos, but watching the people die over and over again was emotionally devastating.

  At last, I took a deep breath, paused the current video, and rubbed my forehead.

  In order to get a break from watching people take their own lives, I turned my attention to the code and jotted Remember death on the top of the page, then searched online for cryptography programs and for codes with dashes and dots, but Braille and Morse code were the two that kept popping up.

  As I was trying to figure out my next step, I heard from Ralph. “Made it up here. I’m in the city.”

  “Excellent. Your flight?”

  “Choppy. I’m alive, but just barely.”

  In my job, I rarely have the luxury of focusing my attention on only one case at a time. Most often it’s a balancing act that I never quite get balanced. Even though I was investigating Jon Murray’s death, I was also entangled in this business with Mannie. And the longer I worked on each case, the more convinced I became that they were somehow interconnected.