Bad Games- The Complete Series

by Jeff Menapace

  The chill now flooded Amy’s veins. Same answer, all right. And there was zero satisfaction in this realization. How could there be? Still, discussing it was necessary, for reasons far greater than catharsis. For reasons of why? and, more importantly, what now?.

  “Why do you suspect that?” Amy asked.

  “I honestly don’t know,” Carrie said. “It’s something I feel more than I can explain. When I look at him, it feels—you know that movie about aliens and body snatchers? Like their appearance is the same, but underneath is something else entirely?”

  Amy nodded.

  “That’s how it feels.” Carrie stared at her coffee for a moment. “Do you suppose something bad happened when he was away?”

  “He was never deployed.”

  “I know.”

  “Besides—” Tears suddenly came without warning. Amy wiped them away and fought to keep her voice from cracking. “This lack of affect, this—” She wiped away more tears. “This slow disintegration of the boy he once was…it started long before he left for the Marine Corps.”

  Carrie placed a hand on her mother’s and squeezed. “Did we ever find out what happened between him and Katy? I mean, they were serious lovebirds. You think she cheated on him or something?”

  “No,” Amy said. “The girl was distraught. She must have showed up to the house a dozen times after, asking me—begging me—to tell her why Caleb did what he did. Those aren’t the actions of a guilty girl.”

  “Did Caleb ever tell you why?”

  Amy looked away in recall. Her words that followed held a dreamy quality, as though she herself was hearing them for the first time. “He said it was for the best—that he was doing it for her.”

  “What does that mean, you think?”

  It IS like hearing them for the first time. You never really considered those words before, did you? Never truly dissected them.

  “I always figured it was just a cookie-cutter reply,” Amy said, her tone still distant. “Like saying ‘it’s not you, it’s me.’ I figured he just wanted out.”

  And now? What do you figure now? “It was for the best?” “Doing it for her?” Doing what for her?

  (Protecting her?)

  From whom? From HIMSELF? Caleb would have never hurt Katy. No way.

  (And maybe that’s exactly why he left. So he wouldn’t hurt her.)

  Or maybe he…maybe he realized how emotionally unavailable he was, given past events. Maybe such a thing had been an ongoing issue with them. Maybe he was being noble, giving Katy her freedom to find someone who could fulfill those emotional needs.

  (Couldn’t have been too much of an issue if she showed up at your door a dozen times, begging you to tell her why Caleb left. Besides, your gut suspects it’s the first thing anyway, doesn’t it? He left Katy because he feared he might hurt her.)

  “Mom? You still with me?”

  Amy blinked and came to. “Yeah.”

  Except she was anything but. She felt as though a window had been opened in the study of her mind’s eye, a gust of wind sending her notes flying, she desperate to grab them, put them back into proper order so that she might—

  (What? So that you might WHAT? These concerns about Caleb’s psyche are nothing new. You’ve entertained them before. Why do they hold more impact now?)

  I don’t know. It was talking about Katy, I think.

  (The very real notion that Caleb left because he feared he’d hurt her?)

  Yes. It would mean he had urges. HAS urges. And he doubted his ability to control those urges.

  (Sex and violence. Such a potent cocktail for one’s formative years. Makes you think of Jacob Bent, doesn’t it? Once the two become intertwined…)

  “Mom?”

  Amy blinked, came to again. Carrie had asked a question. “I’m sorry—what, honey?”

  “You think Domino’s death played a major factor? I mean, I loved Domino too, but let’s be honest; he and Caleb had that special bond. I mean, isn’t Domino the reason Caleb wanted to be a Marine?”

  To voice her train of thought or not? “I think losing Domino is only part of it.”

  “And the other parts?”

  (Jacob Bent.)

  Amy took a deep breath and let it out slow. “Do you remember what I wrote about the Fannelli brothers and nature versus nurture when it comes to deviant behavior? How those pricks thought they were so damn special because they were born to and raised by loving parents, yet reveled in the idea that they were pure evil all the same?”

  “They weren’t born to loving parents, though,” Carrie said. “Their real parents turned out to be psychos just like them.”

  “You don’t need to remind me,” Amy said. “Those assholes were just a simple case of nature—evil giving birth to evil. For as much shit as I used to give you growing up, I like to think your father and I didn’t meet the Evil Parents Requirement.”

  Carrie gave the dry, obligatory chuckle. And then Amy’s point found its way in, and Carrie’s face became grave. Amy’s point had touched on the precise thing Carrie had been speculating about earlier. “Nurture,” she said. “Are you suggesting Caleb might have been nurtured to be…to be the way he is now? Whatever that is?”

  “The things he saw, the things he did at such an age.”

  “I saw the same things. I was young too.”

  “You didn’t beat a man to death with a baseball bat.”

  Carrie went stone silent. Eventually, she said: “So then what? Are you saying Caleb killing that man made him—I don’t know—want to do it again?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  (Isn’t it?)

  NO—it’s…not that black and white.

  (Jacob Bent sure as hell made it seem like it was. Besides, who cares? You said it yourself; who cares how you solve the equation as long as you get the right answer.)

  The answer could be wrong.

  (But you don’t think it is.)

  Amy dropped her head and sighed, taking a moment, her clinical experience in criminal psychology over the past decade coupled with those scattered notes in her mind’s eye trying for two things:

  To explain it to her daughter in a way that Carrie might comprehend. And to explain it to herself, aloud, rendering the act of organizing those scattered notes unnecessary, choosing the writer’s note-taking tool of the tape recorder over the notebook, if you will.

  Amy paused a moment more. Just like Carrie had seemed apprehensive about voicing her concerns about Caleb moments ago for fear of giving those as-yet-unspoken words strength, so too did Amy fear that once her theories about her son were spoken out loud, they would be given strength—promoted out of the theory column and into the very possible column of fact.

  Yet it had to be done. Before moving on to the what now? phase, the why? phase needed to be established and, more importantly, understood. Like an intervention, it wasn’t enough for all parties to just be on board, they needed to be educated themselves, to know exactly what they were dealing with before steps could be taken. And like the metaphorical intervention, Amy needed to believe that there was hope for Caleb. That whatever addiction plagued him was warring with something good inside. Something that wanted to be better. She had to—needed to—believe that.

  “Jacob Bent,” Amy said.

  “Huh?”

  “He was a serial killer they interviewed for my first book about the Fannelli brothers. They allowed me to sit in on the interview. Jacob Bent appeared to be the anomaly the Fannelli brothers wished they were.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Normal family, normal upbringing. Yet he raped and killed six women, all before his eighteenth birthday.”

  “Wow, that’s young.”

  “Yeah…” Amy drifted again.

  Carrie brought her back. “So why are you mentioning this guy? Do you see some correlation between him and Caleb?” Carrie asked these words with incredulous tones, as though the very idea was absurd.

  And how Amy too wanted t
o believe the very idea was absurd. And it could be. Still, she went on for all the aforementioned reasons her mind had justified.

  “Jacob Bent told me he was a quiet kid in school.”

  (Like Caleb.)

  “Just another unassuming kid wandering the halls. No violent impulses whatsoever.”

  (Like Caleb?)

  “He was social enough not to raise doubt about his psyche, but he preferred to be alone. To process whatever bumps life threw at him by himself.”

  (Like Caleb.)

  “When he was thirteen, his class took a field trip into the city. He wandered away from his group, wandered too far, and was assaulted in an alley. He fought the attacker off with a pocket knife—something his father had given him on his tenth birthday. He claims he stabbed the guy in the neck and killed him. Claims he stood there and watched the guy bleed to death before hurrying back to his group. He never said a word about it.”

  “Was that true? Was it ever confirmed?”

  Amy shrugged. “Don’t know. He said no one ever found out. He also said that was the beginning for him.”

  “Beginning?”

  “It ‘turned’ him, he said. He said it stimulated him in ways he couldn’t describe. He told me he masturbated to the memory until the memory wasn’t enough anymore.”

  “What?”

  “It didn’t make sense to me at the time either. I consulted with experts in the field. They told me how sex and violence can become intertwined during a young man’s formative years. That soon the two become one and the same. The impulse for sex fuels the impulse for murder, and vice versa.”

  “Which is why he moved on to rape and murder.”

  “Yes. You know how horny teenage boys are. Now imagine if that constant need for sex held one hell of a caveat: regular sex wasn’t enough; there needed to be death involved for any sense of gratification. Bent told me he would strangle the women as he raped them. That he could only climax if he knew they were going to die.”

  “Jesus, Mom.”

  “I asked him why he never told anybody about the incident in the alley when he was thirteen. Clearly he’d acted in self-defense.”

  (Like Caleb.)

  “He said he didn’t know. I then asked him why he didn’t seek help afterwards. The urges he felt. He knew right from wrong. His family had instilled him with morals. He had no history of mental illness.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He just shrugged. Said it was too late. He’d been ‘turned.’”

  “I don’t believe it,” Carrie said.

  “I’m only telling you what he told me—”

  “No—I’m saying I don’t believe he had no history of mental illness. Or maybe he didn’t. Psychopaths don’t necessarily need a family history of whackos to be psychopaths. There are one-offs.”

  Amy nodded. “Maybe you’re right. But I couldn’t care less about Jacob Bent’s family tree. I care about ours. I care about Caleb.”

  “So, are you saying that it’s possible Caleb killing that man ‘turned’ him, as that Jacob Bent man said?”

  Amy said nothing.

  “This is Caleb we’re talking about here, Mom.”

  “And yet here we are—talking about it.”

  Carrie shook her head. “I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it.”

  “You said you felt there was something ‘bad’ in him.”

  “I do feel that way. But I refuse to believe my brother jerks off to the notion of killing people.”

  “Carrie.”

  “Mom.”

  “I’m not suggesting he does either,” Amy said. “I think Caleb’s at war with himself. I feel he has violent impulses that scare the hell out of him, possibly bred from the moment he killed that man at such a vulnerable age. I also believe that the son I know—the brother you know—is still in there somewhere, trying to do the right thing. But in typical Caleb fashion, he keeps himself to himself.”

  A floorboard creaked behind them. Whiplash quick, mother and daughter turned their heads and looked at Caleb.

  “How much of that did you hear?” Amy asked.

  “Most,” Caleb replied.

  Amy felt her son would resent placation. “And?” was all she said, yet not without reservations at her terseness.

  Tears welled up in Caleb’s eyes. Amy immediately went to get up, but Caleb stuck out his hand, urging her to sit back down.

  “You want to help me?” Caleb asked.

  “More than anything, sweetheart,” Amy said, tears in her own eyes now.

  “Give me Mr. Dixon’s private number.”

  “Mr. Dix—Domino’s protégé?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Do you want to help me or not?”

  24

  The option to sit outside for lunch was available to students, yet on this particular autumn day, it was just too damn cold—the precise reason Andy and Charlie had chosen to sit outside. They needed to be alone.

  Seated on a picnic table across from one another, they fiddled with their soda cans (they’d forgone lunch for sodas only, their appetites—given recent events—gone), finding eye contact difficult. A mutual feeling of embarrassment hung in the air, stinging far greater than the chill that had already reddened their cheeks.

  “Nothing’s changed,” Charlie eventually said.

  “Huh?”

  “We might think we’ve changed, but they don’t—” Charlie flicked his chin towards the cafeteria doors. “They think we’re the same we’ve always been.”

  “But we’re not,” Andy said.

  “So what? What’s the point if they don’t know it?”

  “We need to be patient.”

  “I don’t want to be patient. I want them to know. I want them to know what we’ve done. What we’re capable of. Who we’re becoming.”

  Andy drained his soda and wrenched off the metal tab, dropping it into the can’s hole. He belched loudly into the wind. “You saying they should be next?”

  “I’m saying they need to start showing us some fucking respect. Everyone needs to start showing us some respect.”

  “I’m not so sure putting them on our list would be a good idea,” Andy said.

  “Why?”

  “Remember what Arty and Jim said about avoiding rich pricks in suburbia? The world would come to a screeching halt. Police will treat it like the president’s been taken. We’d get caught.”

  “First off, I’m not suggesting all three get added to our list. Just Mike Childs—just him. Second, maybe getting caught isn’t such a bad thing.”

  “Huh?”

  “I have a confession to make,” Charlie said.

  “What?”

  “I watched the last tape.”

  “You did what?”

  “I watched the last tape.”

  Confusion now joined the betrayed outrage on Andy’s face. “When?”

  “The first night, after we’d watched the first two. You fell asleep before me. I don’t know why I picked the last tape. I guess it was like starting a book and then flipping to the last few pages to see how it ends, you know?”

  Confusion gone, Andy was now back to betrayed outrage, far more so. “No, I don’t know. We made a vow…” He shook his head. “This is so fucking uncool.”

  “I know it is. I’m sorry.”

  Andy kept shaking his head. “Fuck you, man…”

  “Look, I could have kept lying to you and told you I never watched it, but I didn’t. I came clean. Isn’t that worth something?”

  Andy angrily crumpled his soda can and tossed it at the trash can nearby. He missed, cursed, got up, walked over to the can, and stomped it flat. He bent and picked up the flattened can, not dropping it in the garbage can, but skimming it sidearm across the school’s yard instead, like a kid might skip a stone across a lake.

  And this brought a little smile to Charlie’s face, reminding him of something he’d seen on that last tape.

  And after Andy had e
ventually calmed down, Charlie explained his plan, his reasoning as to why it might not be such a bad idea to get caught. That if they pulled it off, they would become immortalized in the annals of American criminal history.

  Charlie also explained to Andy what that something he’d seen on the last tape was. That something that had made Charlie smile only moments ago.

  It was footage, Charlie had said, of Patrick Lambert teaching his son, Caleb, how to skip stones across a lake. Crescent Lake, to be exact.

  25

  Jack Dixon answered on the first ring. “Dixon.”

  Caleb cleared his throat. “Jack Dixon?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “My name is Caleb Lambert. I was—”

  “Caleb Lambert, no shit.” Dixon’s tone went from stern to warm like a switch had been flipped. “Jesus, you sound like a grown man.”

  “So you remember me?” Caleb asked.

  “Of course I do. You were a son to Domino. My team has been keeping a watch on your family ever since.”

  “You have? I never noticed.”

  “You’re not supposed to.”

  Caleb smiled. And then the smile dropped like a stone, the stone plummeting to his gut where it burned hot and uneasy. Just how close of a watch had they been keeping? And did that watch include his little adventure with the prostitute and the bartender?

  “Still there?” Dixon asked.

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “Anything I can help you with, Caleb?”

  Caleb pushed on with his initial objective. If Jack Dixon knew what Caleb had gotten up to that night, he certainly wasn’t acting as such.

  “Yeah, there kinda is,” Caleb replied.

  “Name it and it’s done.”

  “I’m not sure it’s something I want to say over the phone.”

  “No one’s listening, son. Well, they might be trying, but they won’t get shit. My signal bounces across all four corners of this globe like Pong.”

  “Pong?”

  Dixon could be heard chuckling. “Never mind.”

  Caleb chuckled back; it felt like the thing to do. Then: “I’d feel more comfortable talking in person, if that’s all right.”