Prayer for the Dead jb-1

by David Wiltse

  Once he was back in the office, Ty glanced at his watch, then crossed to the storeroom door.

  “Mr. Cohen?” he called. “You all right in there?”

  There was no response. Ty tried the door. It opened immediately. Ty paused a moment, then stepped into the dark storeroom. As he felt for a light switch with one hand, the other moved reflexively toward the holster under his jacket. He felt a pinprick in his thigh and swung a huge arm in front of him to sweep the man away, but Cohen had already stepped back. Agent Hoban could see him pulling farther back into the dark behind a file cabinet.

  “Freeze,” said Hoban, freeing his gun. “Federal agent.”

  “Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot. I’m unarmed.”

  Ty reached toward the pain in his thigh and felt the syringe sticking out of his leg.

  Don’t panic, he told himself. You can handle this. First get the man into the light, then get to the phone.

  “Come out of there. Now!”

  The man, Cohen or Dyce, stepped into the office, his hands in the air. He looked entirely too calm.

  Ty backed toward the phone on the desk, keeping the man at gunpoint.

  “You sterilize this needle?” he asked, realizing the irrelevance of the comment as he spoke.

  “Oh, yes. You won’t get infected. I wouldn’t do that.”

  Thoughtful little asshole. “What’s in it?” Ty asked, pointing at his leg. He couldn’t decide whether removing the syringe would make matters worse. The leg no longer hurt, which he knew was not a good sign.

  “PMBL,” said Dyce.

  “What the hell is that?” Ty saw the phone but couldn’t seem to move any closer to it. He thought of shooting the bastard’s head off just because. What the hell is it? he demanded, only then realizing he hadn’t spoken. Couldn’t speak.

  “I would tell you, but I don’t think you’d understand,” said Dyce. The man was huge and the dose was only the usual one. As the man sat heavily on the desk, Dyce was afraid that he hadn’t given him enough. The agent continued to stare at Dyce as the gun slowly lowered into his lap.

  Shoot the motherfucker, Ty thought. He’s killed you, shoot his head off. But he couldn’t lift the gun, couldn’t pull the trigger. As he pitched forward onto the floor he could no longer see it rising up to hit his face.

  It took a considerable effort for Dyce to drag the man to the storeroom. It would not be possible to get him into the car without being seen, and taping his arms and legs would buy Dyce only a few minutes beyond the life of the drug anyway. Killing him, on the other hand, would give Dyce enough time until Hogg happened to go to the storeroom. That could be minutes or it could be days. He could cut the man’s throat with the scissors from his desk. Or he could inject an air bubble into his artery. He had heard that that would do it, but he wasn’t sure. The scissors were more certain.

  Dyce found the FBI badge and identification and put it in his pocket, then thought about taking the gun, too. He held it in his hand and experienced the surprising weight of it. It was beyond imagining that he would ever point a weapon like this at another person and pull the trigger. Just contemplating the violence of it made him shudder with distaste. He was not that kind of man and had no desire to become one.

  The artery in the man’s neck was easy to find. Dyce pressed and held a finger against it and watched the artery swell.

  The agent was looking at him, but there was no message to read in his eyes; he seemed to be looking on with complete disinterest. The scissors were large and bulky and dull, a clumsy instrument. Dyce remembered the surprising blade on the knife he had used with Helen. That had been so pleasant, he recalled. A moment they had shared together-a long moment. It had been ruined at the end by her outburst, but on the other hand it was her very vitality that had made the experience so good in the first place. This agent wasn’t going to struggle, but Dyce wished there was some animation in him. Watching the peace come over Helen’s face had been so sweet. The agent didn’t look peaceful so much as arrested mid-breath. He looked as if he had been abruptly clubbed, pole-axed like a steer. Serenity would come in time as the muscles gradually relaxed, but Dyce, alas, did not have time.

  “This is going to be a little on the sloppy side,” he said apologetically to the agent. “I haven’t really had time to prepare. If I’d known you were coming…” Dyce giggled. “You should always call first, didn’t you know that?”

  Although the dose was average, its effect was stronger than usual. Dyce regretted it, but how could he have suspected this man would be so susceptible. He’d been afraid the normal dose wouldn’t be strong enough. He knew it was too late to change anything, but if only there was enough energy left in the man to respond in some way. There was beauty in doing it the old way, beauty and peace, but the time with Helen had been exciting in a brand-new way.

  The artery stood out against the pressure of Dyce’s finger, throbbing. Invitingly, Dyce thought. “You won’t feel this, of course, but I don’t think it hurts much anyway. Not that anyone has ever told me.” He started to giggle again.

  He opened the scissors and drew one of the blades across the artery. A white line showed against the dark skin, but no blood. Dyce tried the other blade and managed to get only a trickle from damaged capillaries. The blade was too dull to penetrate to the artery.

  “I mean, really,” he said in disgust. He looked into the agent’s eyes, which looked back with the same impassivity. “I might as well be using a saw,” he said.

  Dyce turned the man’s head away so that the blood, if he ever managed to get to it, would spurt away from himself Using the tips of the scissors, he began to snip.

  “My apologies,” he said. “This is really clumsy… Under different circumstances, I think we might both have enjoyed it.”

  But Dyce was enjoying it now, surprising himself with the pleasure he took, even in this unaesthetic way.

  The blood, when it finally came, was astounding in its volume and pressure. To think that all that pressure came from the tiny pump of the heart.

  It took him several minutes to clean his hand before he closed the closet door behind him and then he had to go back in to retrieve the syringe.

  Surprisingly, although the needle had snapped off in the big man’s leg when he fell, the syringe itself was unbroken. He would need another needle, perhaps several, and more PMBL. There was a needle in the car hidden under the material of the visor and enough PMBL under the seat in a water bottle to suffice for one more injection. After that he would have to return to his supply.

  Dyce’s heart was pounding and he realized it came from excitement, not exertion. Helen had been a revelation and this agent a confirmation. There was more to dying than just being dead. The state of death was serene-but dying, dying was a dynamic act shared by two. Dyce was sorry that it had taken him so long to realize it-but grateful he had learned at last.

  Dyce glanced in the plate glass window of his office and was surprised at how calm he appeared as he walked toward his Valiant. A casual observer would never know he was a man who had just had a life-altering experience. Dyce laughed inwardly at his inadvertent pun. The experience had actually altered two lives.

  A clerk from the hardware store was standing in the store’s doorway. He nodded and smiled politely at Dyce.

  Dyce took the time to pause. “How are you today?” he asked. “Looks like a good one, doesn’t it?”

  The clerk glanced up at the sky. The cheekbones are perfect, Dyce thought. And the nose, sharp and raw as a chip of flint. The eyes were wrong, but they’d be closed.

  “High time we had a good day,” the clerk said. Even the mouth was right, with the same taut lips as his father’s. Dyce felt the stirring within and wondered that it could strike him even now, even when he should be fleeing and sated. In a way the death of the agent may have been only a tease, he realized, not a resolution. He may have served only to whet Dyce’s appetite. Or perhaps to combine two appetites into one larger, all-encompassing, insatiable
one. He felt like a man who had lived his life on a diet of brown rice and has just had his first taste of ice cream.

  “Well, have a good one,” Dyce said. He felt the clerk watching him as he forced himself to walk casually toward his Valiant and slid behind the wheel.

  Perhaps we’ll meet again, Dyce thought to himself He adjusted his rearview mirror and saw that the clerk was, indeed, watching him. Not with any great interest-there was little else to look at on the street- but watching him nonetheless. We may well meet again, he thought. We shouldn’t, but we may.

  Driving well within the speed limit, Dyce left Waverly and headed north toward Minnot.

  “We stopped calling it sexual perversion a few years ago,” Gold said. “Too judgmental. Paraphilia sounds more scientific, anyway.”

  “As if there were science involved,” said Becker.

  “We have our professional image to maintain,” said Gold wryly. “Otherwise, we could just call everybody loony and be done with it. Being scientists, how ever, we like to sort our loonies into categories and give them names.”

  “You’ve loosened your sphincter muscles a bit since we began,” said Becker.

  “That’s the effect you have on me. You’re so comforting to talk to.”

  Becker laughed.

  “Is this a new tack? Shrink as wit and good guy? Shrink as pal?”

  “Shrink as human, maybe. Since I can’t impress you with my credentials or my vast learning, I might as well try my menschlichkeit.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Great, then let’s get on with it. What do you need to know about paraphilia?”

  “How does it happen?”

  Gold shrugged. “I don’t know how specific I can be, but which particular variety? There are an awful lot and some of them have yet to be identified, like the insects in the Amazon basin.”

  “Dyce’s variety. I think he has to make himself look like a corpse to get aroused. And I think he likes to look at other corpses. I don’t know if he does anything to them or not, but I’m pretty sure he sits there looking at them. Probably in the dark. And not just any corpse or he could get a job at a mortuary. They have to look a certain way.”

  “That’s what the mother’s maiden name is all about?”

  “I think it’s a start. If you like redheads with green eyes and freckles, it’s not a bad idea to start with — people with Irish names. He wants Scandinavians, or people who look that way. So he starts with people whose mothers were of Scandinavian descent. He’s got access to thousands of names anyway and this way he’s not going on a random search; he knows where they live, where they work. It’s easy enough for him to get a look at them and see if they’re what he’s after.”

  “Why doesn’t he find someone who looks right in the first place?”

  “Because it’s difficult and dangerous. If he sees somebody in a line in a supermarket, how is he going to find out enough about the guy’s patterns to abduct him? Follow him home? Hope his wallet falls out of his pocket so he can get an address? Strike up a conversation and have witnesses see him? It’s not as if he’s just trying to pick somebody up; he’s selecting a victim, and he’s very careful about it.”

  “Why does he use the mother’s name? Why not the victim’s own name?”

  “I’m not sure. There’s always the fact that you can’t be sure the father is really the father, but I suspect it’s to avoid creating an obvious pattern. I think he’s been at this a long time, and the only way he’s gotten away with it is by making it appear that nothing at all is happening.”

  “Any idea why your boy likes Scandinavians?”

  “His father was Norwegian is all I know. His mother was Jewish, but she died shortly after he was born anyway.”

  Becker paused and Gold studied the ceiling for a moment.

  “Well-in general, paraphilias are caused by some sort of psychic trauma that occurs when a child is between the ages of about three and eight. That’s when the pattern is set in the mind-a lovemap, some call it, but I’m not crazy about the term. It sounds too much like pop psychology, although it’s meant very seriously. Anyway, something happens to the child to derail the normal erotic drive. It could be child abuse-it frequently is-or the loss of a parent or sibling. It could be as simple as severe sexual repression in a family’s attitudes so that the child finds a way of expressing his desire by masking it. Spankers, mild sadists, people who can only have sex if it’s seen as punishment. It could take the form of a fetish that substitutes for forbidden lust-rubber suits, feather, silk garments. Or it can be caused by very complicated circumstances and find expressions that are bizarre in the extreme. There are men who kill their partners after sex as a form of atonement. You probably know about those.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Professionally, I mean. Does any of this help at all? Or even tell you anything you didn’t already know?”

  “Not really.”

  “Sometimes it helps just to hear it said aloud,” said Gold.

  “Maybe.”

  “And how about you?”

  “What about me?” Becker asked.

  “Any closer to telling me about your traumas? It’s all for the same price, as long as you’re here.”

  “Is there any hope for curing somebody like Dyce? If you could find out what has caused him to be this way, could you undo it?”

  Gold studied Becker for a long moment.

  “Truth?”

  “No, lie to me.”

  “No, there’s not much hope. We could keep him drugged, which would probably prevent him from doing it again, whatever it is he does. But to change him fundamentally? He’s a very, very sick puppy. This isn’t neurosis we’re talking about. My profession isn’t too bad with neurosis; we can cure it, or help it, or mask it. But psychosis? No. He’s probably that way for life.”

  “The wiring is twisted.”

  “In the brain, you mean? Yes. Things are hooked up wrong. Some conditions are just because of chemical unbalance, we think. Bipolar manic depression, definitely. Schizophrenia, probably. In time we should be able to control those conditions completely with a pill. I don’t mean drug them; I mean treat them specifically as we can do with hypertension or diabetes. But psychosis is different. You’re right-it’s in the permanent wiring by the time they’re adults, and we’re just not able to tinker with the wiring in the brain. Not yet.”

  “So there’s no hope.”

  “For Dyce. There’s hope for you.”

  “I’m not talking about me,” said Becker.

  “That’s all you’ve talked about since I’ve met you,” said Gold.

  They sat in silence for a long time.

  “Tell me about people who enjoy killing,” Becker said at last.

  The flight to Minnot was like a half-hour roller-coaster ride-a good twenty-nine minutes longer than necessary for anyone but a teenager. Or perhaps someone who’s had his stomach surgically removed. Tee thought. It was certainly more than he needed; he got the point on the first dip and didn’t need any further reminder of the frailty of the aircraft, the whimsical nature of air currents, or the delicacy of his own inner ear.

  “It’s summer,” the pilot yelled over the sound of the engine after the plane had regained altitude only to be sucked downward abruptly once more. “The sun heats up the ground, the air rises, and you get these wind shear kind of things.”

  Wind shear was a word Tee associated with airline disasters. He reached forward to brace himself, but there was nothing to hold onto in the tiny aircraft. Agent Reynolds had shooed him onto the plane with assurances that it was perfectly safe-and also the only thing immediately available. The pilot/meteorologist appeared to Tee to be sixteen and wild-eyed. He likes being bucketed up, down and sideways, Tee moaned to himself. The kid is up here for the sport.

  “It’s nothing to worry about,” said the pilot. He grinned at Tee’s discomfort, revealing a large gap between his front teeth, a condition Tee had always associate
d with stupidity. “Don’t fly much, do you?”

  “Only in real airplanes that give peanuts,” Tee said. He couldn’t decide what to do with his eyes. Looking out made him dizzy and if he looked at the instrument panel, all the whirring dials and flashing numbers alarmed him. The plane tilted sideways and groaned loudly.

  “How about you?” Tee asked. “Do you fly much?”

  The pilot laughed. He thinks I’m joking, thought Tee.

  “It’s just the summer,” the pilot said again. “It’s not dangerous. Except during landing.”

  Tee decided his best bet was to close his eyes and pretend to be asleep. If that didn’t work, he would try to throw up in the pilot’s direction so he could get a little satisfaction before the adolescent killed them both.

  He had tried to protest, but Reynolds had hustled him to the airport and onto the plane before he had much of a chance to think up a good excuse. Not that there was ever a very good excuse for a law officer to ignore a direct request by the FBI, but some kind of demurrer seemed in order if only to establish his independence. The fact was, he didn’t have any excuse; he could be spared at any time and the department would function pretty much the same. It was actually rather exciting to be invited in on the last of the chase for Dyce-it was the feeing of being commanded that he objected to.

  They circled once over a surprisingly flat area of ground that appeared suddenly amidst the surrounding wooded hills as if a giant foot had landed there while striding past. Luxuriant crops covered the area, and along one side was a green strip, distinguishable from the rest of the land only by a windsock at one end and a white streak of powdered lunestone that had been laid down the center. The windsock stood straight out from its pole.

  “Kind of tricky here,” the pilot said before nosing the plane into a steep decline that Tee would have thought was a power dive rather than a runway approach.

  The young pilot brought the plane down as if the grassy airstrip at Minnot were a diving board and he were taking a few preliminary bounces to test the spring.