He tells three of the uniforms to stay on the Spirit Rock, directing them off to the right. He tells the other one, Powell, to stay with him and Myers. “Something happened here. Could’ve diverted Chase.” He points off to the left where no one has searched. “We’re going down there.”
“Off the trail again?” Myers asks.
“Yeah.”
Within twenty feet or so there’s a disturbance in the dirt, maybe animals, maybe Chase. One crude set of footprints. They follow the prints through restricted areas for less than a quarter mile until the footprints stop at a bony riverbed. “Perfect,” Mills says. “It’s all rock from here.”
No one answers him. He looks back and sees Myers doubled over, the other officer trying to help.
“I think I need to stop,” Myers says. “I’m sorry.”
“Stop?” Mills barks.
“Just for a minute. I need water.”
Mills shuffles impatiently in the dirt. Of course. Water. He needs some, too. He’s a shower of perspiration, but it’s dry as fuck out here. In a moment they’re all sucking on their water bladders as if it’s the last drink of life.
He knows they’re running out of time.
He wanders, surveys the area, and scans the walls of rock rising from the riverbed. A hawk soars across the sky, banks sharply, and circles. Then he feels a tap on his shoulder and nearly jumps out of his skin. “Turn around, Mills,” Powell tells him. When he does, she points to a stack of boulders about ten degrees to the right, maybe thirty yards away. Something giant is etched into the rock. The three of them rush in that direction, dodging prickly pears and other thorny cacti, and as they get closer the image becomes clearer. Rising high above them, etched across the face of the steepest, most improbable cliff like an ancient logo, a creature is pleased with itself as it looks upward to the sky. Maybe God, maybe man, maybe animal; who the fuck knows? And the artist isn’t telling.
The outline of the creature’s face is faded, a dusty blemish where the mouth should be. But those eyes. Those eyes, with their huge pupils, have survived centuries out here and have seen enough to stop visitors dead in their tracks.
Myers calls out for Gus. The name echoes off the canyon walls, then tapers like a dying pulse.
“No,” Mills tells him. “The plan is not to alert Chase.”
“But what if he dumped Gus out here and Gus can hear us?”
Mills ignores his colleague because there, far below the eyes of the creature, at the base of the cliff, there’s a pathway into the rock. “Look,” he says.
Very quietly, like a tiny pilgrimage, they approach.
They find a single set of footprints ahead of them. They track the prints without disturbing them, and then, about twenty feet before the opening in the rock, Mills points to a sweep of sand where a predator has dragged its prey—dead or alive. Mills reaches for his radio.
Gus has no idea how long he’s been out. When he opens his eyes everything is sideways. He doesn’t know where he is, so he feels around him; the surfaces are hard, and he tastes dirt in his mouth. Then he remembers, vaguely, the cave. The right side of his face is against the ground. He tries to twist his neck around, can barely see the opening of the cave, but sees enough to know it’s still daylight out there; he’s not sure what day, but the sun is shining.
He lifts his head, but he’s woozy. He stares at the wall, but he can’t decipher the killer’s artwork. “What is it?” he asks. But he realizes his voice is but a whisper. He clears his throat.
“Wakey?” Chase asks.
“I think so,” Gus replies. “Are you done chiseling ?”
“Yes. You like?”
“I’m not quite sure what I’m looking at.”
Chase lunges at him, pulls him by the collar, and sits him in the middle of the cave. “What do you think you’re looking at? You’re looking at death. Your death. You should know me by now.”
“But that’s not death, Teddy,” Gus says with the sourness of sympathy. “That looks more abstract.”
“Look closer,” Chase says. “There’s nothing abstract about it. I’ve been working on it even before I brought you out here.”
“But there’s no body. I don’t see me.”
“Look closer.”
Gus squints if for no other reason than to appease the killer. “Yeah, still nothing. I’m sorry, Teddy.”
“You’ve been seeing it all along, Gus Parker. Your visions have not deceived you. Look closer. Look and you’ll see the fire.”
Gus follows the etchings from floor to ceiling and sees in the manic and desperate exhibit the imagination of a child. From a child’s hand comes the rendition of flames, monstrous and cartoonish, at once. The cave is intensely silent.
Gus says, “Your fire, Teddy. Your house in flames.”
Chase says, “I never saw the fire.”
“Right. Then I don’t get it.”
And Chase says, “Of course you do. It’s your fire.”
“My fire?”
“You’re going to burn to death, Gus Parker. I’m going to light you on fire.”
Gus looks up at the man. Chase is covered in sweat. His huge shadow is lumbering behind him across the wall.
“Light me on fire?” Gus asks evenly.
Chase paces. “What am I supposed to do? You saw the house burning down. So fucking psychic of you. But you wouldn’t shut up about it. Why didn’t you shut up? You should have shut up.”
“It’s not like I leaked it to the media, Teddy.”
“You shouldn’t have told a soul. That was a sacred fire.”
“It led us to you. And so you lured me out here.”
“I’ve been scouring the valley for the perfect opportunity,” he says, still pacing. “It’s not hard to find a trail closed for maintenance, but not every trail is surrounded by so many beautiful symbols.”
“The symbols mean everything to you.”
Chase comes toward him. Circles him.
“And now they mean everything to you, Gus Parker. Because now they symbolize your demise. How did you not see this coming if you’re so psychic?”
“I rarely have visions about myself. Or maybe I just wasn’t concentrating. I don’t know.”
Gus doesn’t like the taste in his mouth. He spits something out, but the taste doesn’t change. He’s hyper-salivating. The drug is wearing off. He knows if he tries to speak again he’ll find himself with a black hole of a mouth and no words, like a scream in the night that doesn’t make a sound. His face is cold, then hot, then cold again. He tries to anchor his breath somewhere deep in the basement of his gut, but he can feel his breath is actually shallow and fleeting. There’s a tightening in his throat, like a noose around his neck, but the only thing gripping Gus is the ending he never saw coming.
There’s a flame in his face.
The killer is kneeling behind him, reaching around with one of those wand-like lighters that people sometimes use to light charcoal grills. It occurs to Gus that he’s about to be charcoaled.
“I’m going to light you on fire,” the man says. “I think I’ll start with this ridiculous head of hair.”
The flame gets closer, close enough for Gus to feel heat on his skin. Chase laughs.
“Are you scared, Mr. Parker?”
Gus nods.
“I was never scared,” Chase says. “Never scared. Never scared. Never scared. . . .”
Chase goes on like that, chanting his mantra, but the flame goes out.
“Never scared . . . never scared. . . .”
Chanting like that as he backs away.
The words descending to a whisper, then silence.
In this protracted stillness, Gus hears the flutter of something at the opening of the cave, like the unwinding of a snake, and Gus turns to the light but sees nothing. The gash of light at the entrance disappears halfway, and Gus senses the presence of a creature there, an animal with its prey, perhaps, but Gus smells nothing wild, hears the panting of nothing, hears nothing
at all, save for the percussion of his heartbeat ringing in his ears.
It’s at least another five minutes before Chase emerges from the dark corner of the cave. He’s shirtless, muscles bulging. He turns his back to Gus, as if to strike a bodybuilder’s pose. But there’s no bend to his arms, no roll of the shoulders, nothing. Just the landscape of torture, an arbitrary collection of symbols carved into the man’s skin. Gus recognizes none of them. And there are words. Burned into the skin, it seems, as if Teddy Smith had been branded like cattle.
“What does it say, Gus Parker?” the man asks.
“‘I love my daddy.’”
“Come again?”
“‘I love my daddy.’”
Then Chase turns around. “Now we’re speaking the same language.” The man reaches to the floor of the cave and retrieves the lighter wand and one of the jugs. He staggers toward Gus. His shadow follows, larger than life against the wall. “I wanted you to see the real vision, Gus Parker, before we put an end to this. Any final thoughts?”
Gus hesitates then says, “I’m sorry this happened to you.”
The man laughs. “Don’t be,” he says. Then he pours liquid from the jug. Instantly Gus knows it’s gasoline or kerosene as Chase draws a circle of the accelerant around him.
The fumes almost knock Gus out. They’re so potent that he can taste them on his tongue. He tries to spit the rising vapors from his mouth.
“I want you to look at my artwork as you go up in flames. You’re going to look at it as you burn to death. Ashes to ashes. It will be your final vision. Ashes to ashes, Gus Parker. And you’re going to behave like a very, very good boy. Do you understand that?”
Chase crouches and pours the liquid over Gus’s clothing.
Then he douses his own.
“Do you understand that, Gus Parker?”
Gus doesn’t answer.
“You will fucking answer me, young man!”
Gus kicks his feet out, hoping to knock Chase off-balance, but Chase is already behind him. With one hand, the killer grabs the rope that binds Gus’s wrists. Gus tries not to resist, but resistance is instinctive. The rage in Gus comes defensively. He listens to it, doesn’t recognize it; it’s the rage of a stranger, and it beats like the heart of a stranger. He has a sort of revelation: somewhere in all of us there it is. Hot, blinding rage. Somehow life either works it out or hires an undertaker. Maybe it emerges as art, or a great game, a world record, or a scorching song. Maybe the only way out is by camouflage, or, more likely, through a transformation that no one, not even the self, will recognize.
Then Gus hears a shuffle of footsteps and wonders if this is what it sounds like to dance with your killer, to waltz your way to your grave.
“Freeze, Timothy Chase! Just fucking freeze!”
Gus spins around, breaking free, and sees a man on his knees about ten feet inside the cave aiming a gun at the killer’s chest. “Mills?”
Alex doesn’t move, doesn’t take an eye off Chase. “Can you move, Gus?”
Gus regards his own wrists. They’re still tied, but Chase has stumbled backward. “I think so,” Gus replies.
“If you can move, Gus, I need you to get out of the cave.”
Gus turns back to Chase, and the choreography becomes clear; Gus is dead center between the killer and the detective. He moves an inch, then another, as if he can escape in unnoticed increments. But he’s making no progress, and he panics for a moment, like a spider trapped in its own web. His eyes can’t seem to focus now. He hesitates. “Hey, Alex, I think I’m disoriented,” he calls.
“Listen to my voice. And try to get behind me,” Alex instructs him. “I’m over here, Gus. Right here.”
“Okay. That’s better.”
“No. It’s not better,” Chase says.
Then the killer bends forward as if he might suddenly charge at Gus. But he stops, ignites the lighter, and just as he aims it at himself a shot rings out.
There’s a spark, then a flame.
Someone grabs Gus by the armpits and pulls. All at once, there’s sunlight.
41
They questioned Gus for days. He wasn’t surprised with the FBI involved now. He gave his story to at least six different agents. “Take all the time you need,” they told him.
They would call him back hours later with more questions.
It was like a shower. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. But only now, two weeks later, is he finally feeling clean.
He couldn’t get away from the story. It was everywhere. On TV, online, in the newspaper. Magazines, like Time. He couldn’t get away, and he couldn’t look away, like driving by the scene of your own accident, not quite recognizing that that’s your car and that’s your life.
He saved the newspaper from the first morning.
PHOENIX DETECTIVE ARRESTED FOR CAVE MURDERS
Cop Worked Under Pseudonym, Fooled Colleagues
(That was just the headline. There were four more stories that morning alone.)
CHASE, FORMER FBI PROFILER, CAUGHT UP IN CYCLE OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, MOTHER SAYS
(Priscilla Smith gave a lengthy interview.)
POLICE REPORT: SUSPECT TRIED TO KILL HIMSELF
(But failed.)
CHASE ARREST BLACK EYE FOR CITY
(The chief and the mayor made short, dueling statements. Let the spin begin!)
FBI JOINS INVESTIGATION, MOST DETAILS WITHHELD
(Ironic.)
Amazing how a story with few details could yield five separate headlines and five separate reports in one newspaper. But it did. The media exploded. To reporters, the story was better than sex, and they were having newsgasms everywhere. The arrest report had been heavily redacted, but they milked it and milked it and milked it, splattering their stories above the fold, below the fold, across the TV screen, extended newscasts, special editions, late-breaking developments, blogs, tweets, posts, #cavemurder, @cavemurder, #phxkiller, and every which way up and down the hyperbole highway.
No one knows about his involvement yet (one of those details that, so far, has been withheld).
The last thing he really remembers about the cave is Alex Mills rushing to the killer’s side. And then Gus was out, looking up at the sky, into the barrels of a SWAT team perched on the surrounding cliffs, and the droning sound of a chopper, undoubtedly sent from heaven, its blades slicing the sky, speaking the language of a savior.
Mills’s hands are calloused and knotty. They look old and arthritic. Stress, he tells himself. Too many clenched fists. And yet he’s okay with the FBI stepping in.
“They’re not taking over,” his sergeant, Woods, told him. “But this is as much their case as ours.”
“I understand,” Mills said.
“You’re technically the case agent.”
“As far as the department’s role is concerned.”
“Right.”
“Okay then,” Mills said. “I’m good.”
And that was it. There was no rancor or dissent. It just was. Mills is done with the hard part. He’s done mining for truth. Let the FBI turn it into gold.
His desk is a mess. There are files everywhere. And newspapers. They all basically say the same thing. Serial killer caught. Bad man arrested. Cave murders solved. Police department in hot water. What the fuck and who gives a shit what the media reports? He doesn’t. But still he saves the newspapers, all of them, from the first report of Elizabeth Spears’s murder to the report of Chase’s arrest. So many reporters and so many headlines squeezed out of their asses after a shockingly limited diet of facts.
And this one is his favorite:
COACH, DEPUTY CHARGED IN HIGH SCHOOL DRUG RING
Alex was with him for most of the questioning. That made the whole ordeal, even the redundancy, easier. But Gus didn’t learn until two days after Chase’s arrest how Alex had found him. It was the first time the two of them were alone together away from the friendly interrogators. They were walking back to their cars after a meeting with the FBI. The air was crisp for
the desert, a kind of clear. wintry night that is met by the aroma of mesquite as thin-blooded Phoenicians flock to their fireplaces to escape the downright frosty sixty degrees. Even Alex rubbed his hands together briskly to ward off the chill.
“You okay?” he asked Gus.
“Yeah. Fine.”
The detective looked at him as if he didn’t believe him.
“What?” Gus asked.
“Just making sure. Not every day a serial killer threatens to burn you alive.”
“How’d you find the cave?” Gus asked.
Alex described the frantic search at the Superstitions. “But when I saw that something had been dragged into that cave, I knew we found you. Took me a few minutes to get my bearings in there. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on.”
“Well, I was mighty glad when you showed up,” Gus confessed.
“It was nothing.”
“Maybe for you.”
Alex laughed. “Actually I was kind of freaking out. Thought we got there too late.”
“So, how did Chase make it out without burning to death?”
“It was the flash of the gunshot that started the fire, not his lighter,” Alex replied. “Then Powell tackled him, smothered the flames before they spread. You probably owe her your life.”
“I think I owe you both,” Gus said.
“Yeah, well, I probably shouldn’t have fired that shot, Gus. Not smart,” the detective admitted. “Could have blown us all up. I’m in a little bit of trouble for it.”
Gus winced. “Sorry to hear,” he said, and then added, “What do you think? Chase wanted to get caught? I mean, he lured me to a rather obvious place with all those symbols.”
“What we think is a clue or a symbol is not always a clue or a symbol to the killer.”
“Of course it was. Did you see his back?”
Alex snickered and rolled his eyes. “Oh, yes. I did. But you can’t assume Chase was working on a conscious level. He’s had two identities in a lifetime. Who knows how much the two were really allowed to know about each other?”
Desert Remains Page 39
