“It almost certainly didn’t come from the serial killer.”
“Oh,” said Step. “Well I guess that’s a relief.”
“But how do you know that,” said DeAnne, “since you don’t know who the serial killer is?”
“We’ve got psychological profiles. Some guys, they try to tease the cops. Son of Sam, you know. Taunting us. They want to get caught. But then there’s the Ted Bundy types. Smart. Cool. All they care about is not getting caught. Bundy never sent letters to the papers. Bundy never tipped his hand to anybody. I mean, he had a girlfriend that he was sleeping with during half the time he was going out killing those women, and she never had a clue. She knew he did some shoplifting and stuff, but had no clue about the killings. This serial killer—if there is one, cause it’s not like we can prove it yet—he’s like Bundy. He’s smart, and he doesn’t want to get caught. He’s scared of getting caught, and he doesn’t like being scared. He isn’t in this for the thrill. He’s in this for—something else.”
“What?” asked Step.
“I’m not here to tell you about serial killers,” said Douglas. “It’ll ruin your sleep for a long while. It’s sure as hell ruined mine. Begging your pardon for my language, ma’am.”
“I just wonder how you know all this about him,” said Step.
“We know it because we haven’t found the bodies. Not a trace, not a clue. If he was a talker, after seven disappearances we’d’ve heard from him by now. Especially after the article. That’s why we called in the press on this—we hoped we could flush him out. But he’s the other kind. If he exists. He’s the kind who can’t stand the idea of public attention being focused on him. So now that the article’s been run, I expect him to lay low for a while. He’s been hitting every couple of months, but I imagine he won’t hit again this year. All depends, though.”
“On what?” asked Step.
“On how strong it is, whatever it is that’s driving him to kill.”
“I hate this,” said DeAnne. “Because he has something to do with my son.”
“Maybe not,” said Douglas. “I’d like to meet your boy, if I could.”
“I don’t want him interrogated,” said Step immediately.
“Oh, no, that’s not my way. He’s a boy, and he’s a troubled boy. I’ve got children of my own. I just have to—make some sense out of him coming up with these names, don’t you see. And if I meet him, get a feel for who he is, then that might help me understand what to make of this.”
“I really don’t want you to,” said DeAnne. “We’d have to tell him you’re a policeman, and then he’d—”
“So you wouldn’t consider telling him I’m an uncle from out of town?”
“He knows all his uncles,” said Step. “And he’s not stupid.”
“Why not trust me?” asked Douglas.
“Why can’t you just—work from the envelope the record came in? We’ve still got it, and the record sleeve. You could take fingerprints or something.”
“I’ll tell you what,” said Douglas. “Who do you think might have sent it?”
At once Step and DeAnne both became reluctant. “Well,” said Step, “it would only be speculation. We don’t want to get some innocent person in trouble.”
“You see?” said Douglas. “You already have some people in mind who might have sent that record. You’ve got enough people you’re thinking about that you know most of them are innocent, but one of them probably sent it. Right?”
“But the one who did—” said Step.
“The one who did is not the serial killer. That’s just a plain fact. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about serial killers, they don’t change their pattern. Once they’ve got it set, they don’t change. Even the ones who think they’re changing it every time, they’re only changing stupid meaningless details. The basic pattern remains absolutely the same because that’s part of the ritual, you know? If they didn’t do it the same, it wouldn’t give them . . . what it gives them. But make a list of your acquaintances who might want to send you a threatening message. I won’t go question them. I’ll just hang on to the list. And then I’ll compare it to other lists we’ve got, and if they show up on another list, then we’ll go question them, and they’ll think we’re bothering them because of the other list, not yours. And if they don’t show up on any other list, we leave them alone. Fair enough?”
“All right,” said DeAnne.
“As for your record-sender, well, someday he might turn into a killer, but if he’s still at the anonymous threat stage, he’s got a ways to go. The evil is still creeping up inside him. Hasn’t taken him over completely yet. In other words, he’s still a basically civilized person. And he may keep that evil under control, too. May control it till the day he dies. Nobody’ll ever know. And all he ever did, the worst thing he ever did was mail somebody a forty-five rpm record by the Police. Let’s hope that’s how it works out. That’s how it usually does.”
“Usually? There are a lot of forty-fives getting sent around?”
“A lot of anonymous messages. More than you could imagine. I’d say most people get a couple of them during their lives, and maybe most people send one or two. You get so filled with rage, you want to hurt somebody, only you don’t have enough hate in you to poison them or burn their house down. So you send a letter. You throw trash on their lawn. You call them on the phone and then hang up—again, again, all night, until you start getting afraid that they might be having their phone traced so then you stop. You ever got strange calls like that?”
“Once,” said DeAnne.
“Me, too,” said Step.
“It’s going on, all the time. There aren’t enough policemen in the world to track down all of that. And most of the time it’s just what you thought—somebody you know who’s angry at you. Maybe even your best friend, only they can’t bring themselves to confront you, so they send you a record and it gets it off their chest and nothing more ever happens.”
“That’s a relief,” said DeAnne.
“Well, you should be relieved. But you should also find out who’s at the door before you open it, and make sure you know who the next package is from before you open it. Because one time in ten thousand, the guy’s not kidding.”
“With one hand he giveth comfort,” said Step, “and with the other he taketh it away.”
“What can I say?” said Douglas. “I’m dying for a cigarette, and the thing I came out here for was to find out why you had all those names, and you aren’t letting me meet your son.”
“We thought you’d tell us why our son knew those names,” said Step.
“Well, I’m not gonna subpoena him. But I’ll tell you folks, every little boy in this town is in danger right now. This killer may lay low for a while, but he’ll be back soon enough, and whatever he’s doing, he’s going to be damned hard to catch. How many more is he going to kill before he finally slips up? I hope not yours, but he’ll kill somebody’s.”
“But Stevie couldn’t possibly know—” Step began.
“What are you hoping to find out from him?” asked DeAnne.
“Not the name of the killer, so rest your minds about that,” said Douglas. “Nothing concrete at all. I just want to get a feel for who he Is. For the kind of person he is.”
“He’s a good kid,” said Step.
“I’m sure he is,” said Douglas.
Step laughed. “And I bet you hear that from the parents of drug pushers and rapists and embezzlers all the time.”
“Either that or ‘I always told him he’d end up in jail.’”
Step looked at DeAnne. DeAnne looked at him. “We’ve come this far,” she said.
“We let him talk to that miserable shrink,” said Step. “For two months. What can Mr. Douglas do worse than Dr. Weeks?”
“I’ll get him,” said DeAnne.
While she was gone, Step had to ask. “What do they get out of this? Guys like . . . the one you’re looking for?”
Douglas raise
d an eyebrow. “Morbid curiosity?”
“Yes,” said Step. “But I’m also a historian. I study human nature, and somehow this guy is human, right?”
“No,” said Douglas. “Guys like that start out human, but there’s an empty place inside them, a hungry place, and it starts sucking the humanity, the decency, the love, the goodness right out of them. And by the time they get to where this guy is, there’s nothing left but that hole. And so the guy spends all his effort trying to fill that hole, to find something to satisfy that thirst, that hunger, that nothingness in him, only he never can. He just tries over and over and over again, and it’s never enough. If the guy has any decency left, some scrap of humanity somewhere in the shadows, then he’ll leave clues for us, he’ll do like Son of Sam and taunt the cops, he’ll cry for help. Free me from this hunger that’s eating me alive. But the worst ones, there’s nothing left. This guy, there’s nothing.”
“Well if it’s all gone, his humanity, then wouldn’t people around him know it?”
“They may know it. He may be a complete son-of-a-bitch who sics his dogs on anybody who comes near his property. But then he might also be the nicest, most normal-looking guy. You just never know. It could be your dentist. The bag boy at the grocery. A minister. He fools everybody.”
“How?” asked Step. “Why can’t people see through his lies?”
“’Cause he doesn’t lie,” said Douglas. “It’s like Bundy again. He really believes that he’s innocent. Because it isn’t him doing it, it’s this evil thing inside him. He knows it’s there, but it’s not him, see, and so he doesn’t even feel guilty, because he knows that he’d never do anything like those horrible things.”
“So it could be anybody, and he wouldn’t even know it himself?”
“Oh, he knows it,” said Douglas. “Because all the time that he’s telling himself that he would never do this bad stuff, in fact he’s working as hard as he can to protect that other part of him. To keep anybody from catching him. No, he knows. If he didn’t know what he was doing, if he was really crazy, we’d have found the bodies.”
They heard DeAnne talking as she came down the hall. “It’s nothing all that important,” she was saying. “He just wants to talk to you.”
Stevie came into the room, looking sleepy. So he finally had taken a nap, Step thought. Douglas didn’t stand up, just stuck out his hand. Because he was sitting down, his head was at about the same level as Stevie’s. “I’m Doug Douglas, son,” he said. “Would you shake my hand?”
Stevie came forward and took Douglas’s big hand and shook it, solemnly.
“I don’t know how much your mama told you about me, but I’m a policeman.”
Stevie glanced down at Douglas’s suit.
“That’s right, I don’t wear a uniform. I’m a detective, so if your daddy ever drives faster than the speed limit, I’ll let him go right by because traffic isn’t my job.”
Douglas paused, apparently waiting for Stevie to ask him what his job was. Of course Stevie didn’t say a thing.
“The thing is,” said Douglas, “there’s a bad person in Steuben these days who’s been kidnapping kids. Do you know what kidnapping is?”
Stevie nodded.
“Well, you’re going to be hearing a lot about this guy at school tomorrow. What grade will you be in?”
“Third.”
“Yeah, you’ll hear a lot. Your teachers will tell you, cops like me will come to school and tell you—stay away from strangers. If somebody grabs you, scream your lungs out.”
“We already taught him all this,” said DeAnne. “He already follows these rules.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” said Douglas. “Do you always follow those rules?”
Stevie nodded.
“And what if somebody wanted you to go off alone with him, and you said no, ’cause it was against the rules, but then he said, All right, but don’t you ever tell anybody that I asked you. What would you do?”
“Tell Mom and Dad,” said Stevie.
“What if he said that if you told, he’d hurt you.”
“I’d still tell.”
“This boy’s been well trained,” said Douglas. “Stevie, I hear you have some good friends.”
DeAnne stiffened, and Step said, “Mr. Douglas.”
“Now, now, Stevie doesn’t mind talking about his friends. Do you, Stevie?”
Stevie shrugged. A little one-shoulder shrug.
“Well, I’m not going to ask anything hard. I just want you to tell me one thing. Who was it who told you their names?”
“Jack,” said Stevie.
“Jack,” said Douglas. “Now, is he one of those friends, or are you thinking about some other Jack?’
“He’s one of them,” said Stevie.
“So he told you his own name,” said Douglas.
Stevie nodded.
“And everybody else’s name.”
Stevie nodded. “Except Sandy,” he said.
“And who told you Sandy’s name?”
“Sandy,” said Stevie.
“Stevie, I bet you love your mom and dad, don’t you?”
Stevie nodded, immediately, deeply.
“Well, I just want you to know that I’ve been talking to them for the last while and they really love you, too. More than you even know, and I’ll bet you already think they love you a lot, don’t you.”
Again he nodded.
“They love you so much that they want you to be safe, all the time. Now can you do that for them? Can you keep yourself safe? Follow all those rules?”
Stevie nodded.
“Well that’s it then,” said Douglas. “I’m glad to meet you, Stevie. And if anybody ever gives you any trouble, you just tell them that Doug Douglas is your friend, and they better be nice to you, all right?”
Stevie nodded again. And then said, “Thanks.”
“Can you go off to your room again now, Stevie?” said Step. “We just need to talk to Mr. Douglas here a little bit more, OK?”
Stevie headed back to the hall. DeAnne got up and followed him; when she came back a moment later, she said, “I just had to make sure he was back in his room.”
“Well,” said Step. “I don’t know what you could possibly have learned from that.”
“Oh, I learned what I needed to learn,” said Douglas.
“And what was that?”
“Your son’s honest,” he said. “He’s sweet. Deep into his heart, he’s sweet. If God could taste him, that’s what God would say: This boy is sweet, right through.”
Step wasn’t about to disagree with him, but he didn’t see how Douglas could know that from the banal little conversation he had with Stevie.
“He reminds me of my late wife,” Douglas said. “She’d have nightmares sometimes, terrible ones. She’d wake up in the middle of the night and make me hold her close and she’d tell me the nightmare. And then I’d get up in the morning and go to work, or sometimes I’d get a call that very night, and it would be a crime that had something to do with her dream.” Douglas leaned back, remembering. “One time she dreamed of a blue dress, trying to put it on, only it kept slipping off of her, she couldn’t wear it, and it frightened her, you know the way it is when you’re dreaming, you get scared over silly things like that, not being able to put on a dress. And then I get to work and there’s this woman and they’re taking her statement and the story is that she was raped that night, the guy chased her, and three times she slipped out of his grasp because of the dress she was wearing, that blue dress.”
“Oh,” said DeAnne.
Step had studied folklore in college and he knew from the start how the story would end. They all ended that way. “That actually happened to your wife? Or didn’t you hear it from a friend of a friend?”
Douglas laughed softly. “You’re the man who called me up because you had that list, and you’re asking me if this is just some fairy tale? Yeah, we’re always skeptical about the other guy’s story. But I don’t r
eally care whether you believe me because that’s not what I’m trying to tell you anyway. What I’m telling you is, there’s some people who do things so bad it tears at the fabric of the world, and then there’s some people so sweet and good that they can feel it when the world gets torn. They see things, they know things, only they’re so good and pure that they don’t understand what it is that they’re seeing. I think that’s what’s been happening to your boy. What’s going on here in Steuben is so evil and he is so good and pure that he can’t help but feel it. The minute he got to Steuben he must have felt it, and it made him sad. My wife was like that, always sad. The rest of us, we’ve got good and evil mixed up in us, and our own badness makes so much noise we can’t hear the evil of the monster out there. But your Stevie, he can hear it. He can hear the names of the boys. Only, just like my wife made a dream out of it, a dream of trying to put on a dress, your Stevie takes those names and he makes friends out of them. And to him those friends are real because the evil that pushed those names into his mind, that is real.”
“So you don’t think Stevie is crazy,” said Step.
“Hell, you know he ain’t crazy. You got the list, don’t you?”
“Is there something we should do?” asked DeAnne.
“I can’t think of anything, except hold on to your children, hold them tight, keep them safe.”
“Yes sir,” said Step.
Douglas got up. “I need me a cigarette now, so I’ll be on my way.”
“I’m sorry we bothered you about something that turned out not to be helpful to you,” said Step.
“Oh, this helped me a lot.”
“It did?”
“Sure,” said Douglas. He stood in the open doorway. Step and DeAnne stepped out onto the porch with him. “Before you called,” said Douglas, lighting a cigarette, “we weren’t a hundred percent sure that there even was a serial killer. But now—well, now I know. Because otherwise your son wouldn’t have known those names, now, would he? They wouldn’t have been all together in a list, would they, unless they all had something in common with each other and with no one else. There’s a few kids disappear every year, and it’s not evil, it just happens. It’s part of the order of nature. Your son never noticed those. These he noticed. So now I know.”
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