Portrait of the Psychopath as a Young Woman - Edward Lee.wps

by phuc

There was nothing else he could do but go snoop.

  He peeked in a window on the house on the left. An old guy and his wife watching TV. Then he quietly walked around the side of the house on the right. County police'll probably get a peeper call any minute. Explain that to the chief's liaison...

  Dark basement windows lined the foundation. One first floor window stood dark. He went around back.

  Light, he thought.

  He rose to his tiptoes, peering in. At first what he saw didn't register how could it?

  A scarlet bed.

  Then more details focused.

  God almighty.

  Spence stepped back. He turned away to think; he closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he saw...

  The great lit Peace Cross out on Bladensburg Road near the bridge. It was a war memorial or something, a landmark, probably 50 feet high and constructed of dark, pebbled stone.

  The Cross, he thought.

  He turned back to the window.

  The Cross in The Window.

  He could not imagine the link. He'd been searching for Shade to relieve her of the distraction of her uncle. But...

  This was impossible.

  This is the killer's house, came the blazing and equally impossible realization.

  (II)

  It felt like a great, wobbly bubble rising from deep water. When Kathleen awoke, she thought she was dead. She remembered in guillotine like snatches: the room, Maxwell's entrails and limbs strew about the floor, then Sammy

  Killing me, she thought.

  Pain burned at the back of her neck; her brain had winked out like a light. But I'm not dead, she thought. How could she be? She lay face down in the hall. Alive.

  In increments, she was able to lean up, look around.

  What she saw seemed like a loud, thunking nightmare.

  Two dark figures, one tall, one short, struggled behind her in the hall. "Daddy!" shrieked the taller. "You're back!" The smaller figure was but a puppet thrown to and fro against the wall.

  Each impact of the skinny form resounded through the house. It was like watching a dog shake a ragdoll in its jaws. THUNK...THUNK...THUNK...

  Then the shorter figure collapsed.

  "Aw, God, baby, please. You don't understand."

  The tall figure leaned over, tremoring in some weird form of delight. "Daddy's back, Mother!

  Look! He's come back to us!"

  "Baby, please, I love you," croaked her uncle's wasted voice. "You're my child."

  "Come into Daddy's Room," he was answered.

  "No, Jesus Christ nooooooooooo "

  "Come in with us..."

  Sammy, then, was dragged into the charnel room.

  The door slammed shut.

  Kathleen tried to rise but then passed out again.

  | |

  Chapter 40

  (I)

  Spence whispered into his Motorola, "I want the biggest signal 13 in the history of the law enforcement."

  "What's that, Lieutenant?"

  "Scramble every car, every helicopter, everything you got. I want every TAC guy in the city here in five minutes."

  The pause reflected the dispatcher's confusion. "I don't get it. What's going o "

  "Just do it," Spence ordered.

  "But...why?"

  "Shade," Spence whispered. "I got no idea how, but Shade found out where the killer lives."

  "You mean...your psycho?"

  "That's right." Spence gulped. Only now was it sinking in. "This is the killer's house," he said.

  "On the way."

  Spence clipped the radio back to his belt. His back to the house, he checked his Smith snub in the moonlight, checked his speedloaders, and took several deep breaths. Darkness hung still in the cramped backyard. Spence wondered how many bodies were entombed here.

  The window was too high to get in quietly. He didn't really want to go in that way anyhow; he remembered the quick glimpses: all the blood and entrails, sawed limbs. There'd even been something on the floor that looked like a stepped on brain. Poor fuckin' Platt, he thought. What a way to go.

  He crept back around the side. The foundation level basement windows were dark, and one, tested by Spence's foot, was not locked. He knelt and shined his penlight in, saw nothing but blocks of scary black. Here goes, he thought. He ought to wait for the TAC teams but Shade's in the house somewhere. Every second I wait is another second she can die in. He squeezed through the little open window, lowered himself down, and

  Good God...

  almost threw up from the stench. Meaty, dank rot. Sweat, blood, excrement. His penlight found a caged bulb hanging. He yanked the string and filled the basement with light.

  And stared.

  A starved, red haired woman had been chained naked across a bench. Her skin gave off a tint like spoiled cream.

  Eyes glued shut. Mouth closed by surgical stitches. She was so skinny the slats of her ribs looked like fissures.

  Dead, he concluded, applying a finger to her jugular. It was Creamy, he realized, ‘Rome's hooker. Starved to death down here. That's how the killer had thrown him off track. Leaving the prostitute's prints, and strands of her hair on the evidence. It seemed brilliantly macabre...

  Another workbench against the cinderblock wall. Blood encrusted tools lay in disarray. Buckets and plastic garbage bags Spence frowned into each one. Clumped blood and sewage filled the buckets; bloody clothes filled the bags. And shoved under the bench...

  A shoed foot.

  Then the foot moved.

  Spence dragged out a figure lashed by ropes into a fetal position. The figure trembled. Still alive, Spence thought in a grim rejoice. The long blond hair gave it away.

  It's Platt.

  Eyes glazed by terror bugged up. Spence untied the knots, peeled off the duct tape which sealed the poet's lips.

  "I believe in God now," came Maxwell Platt's desiccated whisper.

  "How bad are you hurt?"

  "I'm all right, I think. I think she was saving me for later."

  "Okay." Spence helped him up, crutched him toward the window. "Everything's gonna be all right," he said. "I want you to get out of here right now. Don't make any noise, just get out. A whole shitload of cops are on the way. Get out and start running, and don't stop."

  "Kathleen," Platt whispered. "Is she "

  "She's fine," Spence lied. "She's at her apartment. Just run to the main road and call an ambulance for yourself."

  "Thank you," Platt mumbled, "Thank "

  "Just shut up and get out of here, will ya?"

  Spence helped the shaken poet up through the window and out. He stood a moment amid the stench and pale light. What could be scarier than a psycho killer's basement? he asked himself.

  Answer: a psycho killer's basement when the psycho killer's still in the house. But was she? Was the killer upstairs right now? And where was Kathleen Shade?

  Was that Shade's guts I saw on the floor? Was that Shade's brain?

  Spence shucked his snub. Then he began to move up the stairs to the first floor.

  The silence irked him. His noiseless footfalls sounded, to him, like a goon squad clamoring up the staircase.

  On the landing, he peered forward. A hallway led to a faintly lit living room; he saw a typewriter on a table. An open door stood just to his left. Spence three pointed into the room. Empty. It was a bedroom...

  A veil of more light seemed to sift from an open closet.

  What the fuck's this?

  Gun in lead, Spence stepped into the closet.

  What faced him, objectively, was a large pane of glass. But what he saw in that pane made it something else altogether.

  It was an interstice. It was a portal to hell.

  A tall, sleek woman leaned over a brass bed. Spence couldn't see her face. His eyes quickly cataloged the room, the same room he'd seen outside. Entrails spilled on the floor. Ribbons of gore sodden clothing. Sawn limbs and the squashed brain. Under the window stood a dresser topped by surgica
l gear and power tools. A large wooden cabinet, its doors open, sat atop the dresser too, and tacked to the insides of the door were what appeared to be old newspaper clippings. In an opposing closet he saw at least half a dozen wigs on faceless mannequin heads...

  His eyes darted back to the bed. A man, ankles and wrists handcuffed to the rails, tremored on the mattress. Spence remembered the mugshot.

  It was Samuel Curtis Shade.

  Two way mirror, Spence realized. He was watching the killer about to start working. And She can't see me, he knew.

  Yet the initial horror left him rigid as a wood post driven into the ground. His eyes could not move away from their witness.

  Samuel Shade looked only barely conscious. The woman had cut his clothes off and was now sewing shut his lips...

  Line up, he thought. Spence assumed a firing position called The Weaver Stance, both elbows slightly flexed, his face behind his gun's tiny sights. The .38 standard pressure round would penetrate the two way mirror without much deflection. He decided to fire double action rather than cock the snub's cut hammer and risk the click giving him away. Mid lumbars, do it now, he thought.

  Spence never heard the shot. The little gun bucked. The mirror shattered and fell like a rain of tinsel. Spence blinked cordite out of his eyes. Sooty powder, he managed to think despite the fact that he'd just shot a woman in the back. Change brands. He looked into the heinous room and saw the woman lying splayed on her stomach. The bloodspot seeped just right of the spine, a few inches. Take some classes from the armorer, Spence suggested to himself, still strangely calm.

  You were aiming for the spine on a stationary target and you missed, you asshole. But with a .38

  wadcutter in the kidney, he doubted she'd be getting up again.

  He went out into the hall, keyed his Motorola. "This is Spence, I just took down the killer. Get an ambulance here right n "

  BAM!

  A chunk of wall exploded to his right. Spence urinated in his slacks and dropped the radio. The low muzzle flash gave him the killer's position: on her belly firing up from the bottom of the doorway. But Spence was a sitting duck; he was standing in the middle of the hall with no cover.

  He put his back to the left wall instinctively, fired four shots left handed at the lower doorway bam bam bam bam!

  ejected the spent shells, popped in five fresh ones with his first speed loader BAM!

  winced at the colossal concussion of the return fire, thought This bitch must be shooting artillery at me! then put five more .38's down toward the muzzle flash, reloaded again as his bladder continued to betray him, aimed and

  BAM!

  Spence went down.

  | |

  Chapter 41

  (I)

  Kathleen's consciousness seemed to revive like hard slaps to a tired face. She heard one of the loudest sounds she could imagine a heavy, tonerous BAM! then four little pops, then another BAM!

  Then a thunk from down the hall.

  She leaned up and saw the bedroom door creak shut.

  Get out, was her first thought. She crawled forward, the back of her neck burning as if a nugget of hot glass had been embedded there. She squinted down the dark hall, saw a large figure lying before an open, black doorway.

  She heard an unpleasant, wet spitting noise.

  It's Spence, she thought.

  She used the kitchen wall for balance. She stood up. Get out, the thought returned, but the wet spitting noise continued. It reminded her of someone crinkling up wrapping paper.

  It's Spence, she thought again.

  With all the effort she could muster, she walked past the closed bedroom door to the end of the hall and knelt before Spence.

  The right side of his dress shirt, beneath his jacket, was soaked with blood. She put a hand to his cheek. His eyes bulged either in pain or outrage, and for some reason Kathleen suspected the latter. A froth of blood bubbled at his lips.

  "Spence... Jesus," she uttered.

  He grabbed her blouse. His voice sounded like someone talking with a chest cold: "Get out of here."

  "But you're shot!" she whispered. "I've got to get you to a "

  Fluid rattled in Spence's throat as more blood bubbled up. "I'm dying, it hurts," he said inanely.

  "Don't waste your time." He coughed twice, and winced. "TAC team's on the way. Go downstairs, crawl out the basement window. When you get outside, put your hands up or else my people will shoot you." Even more inanely, then, he began to jabber, "Goddamn standard pressure rounds, I knew I should have used custom loads or something, you know?" He blinked up at her. "I've never been in love, isn't that funny? Aw, Christ, I don't want to die."

  "You're not dying! Shut up!" Kathleen whispered.

  "I loved my mother," he rasped. "I really did. But but I never told her that and she died."

  Kathleen could not comprehend this. Her hands fumbled at his massive upper chest, loosened his tie. She didn't know what to do.

  Then he squinted at her in the strangest way. "I never disliked you, Kathleen," he whispered, hitching. "It was just a game I had to play. I had to use you. I'm sorry."

  "Shut up!" she whispered again.

  "I'm really sorry..."

  She saw now that he was crying, and the hitching, bloodspurtling coughs were backed by something close to laughter. The last thing he said before he passed out was: "Oh, and Platt's still alive. I got him out a few minutes ago. He's okay "

  (II)

  It's strange.

  It's nothing like she thinks it'll be.

  She knows she's dying but she doesn't care.

  She can feel blood pumping out of her back.

  She's already sewn up Daddy's mouth.

  She's already stuck dissecting pins into his ears, his sinuses, his navel, and his testicles.

  He lurches with each insertion.

  The smothered scream rages.

  Then she opens the Bruns serrated plaster shears.

  She cuts it off.

  She takes it away from him.

  She takes away all her pain.

  She takes away all her mother's pain.

  But where is her mother?

  "Mother?"

  She's crying and she feels strange.

  She picks up the power drill.

  "Mother? Where are you?"

  (III)

  No, Kathleen thought. She couldn't leave him here. Not here. She felt maniacal. God, he weighs more than a piano! she thought ludicrously. She began dragging him down the hall by his suit jacket...

  Then she heard the electric whine, the drill.

  She could hear its shrill from behind the closed bedroom door. She's in there, she thought. With Uncle Sammy.

  Kathleen would never know what compelled her to do what she did next. She released Spence, went back down the hall, and retrieved his small revolver.

  What are you doing? she wondered.

  Then she opened the door and looked into Daddy's Room for the last time.

  (IV)

  The tall woman was drilling Uncle Sammy's Adam's apple. The body shackled to the bed arched upward, tremoring like an epileptic seizure. Then it fell limp.

  Uncle Sammy was dead.

  Kathleen held the gun on the woman. The woman leaned against the bed. She was dressed in a dowdy blue custodial uniform, whose right pant leg looked black from all the blood.

  Still leaning against the bed, the woman turned toward Kathleen.

  "I...," the woman said.

  The woman's face, obscured by the wedges of fluorescent light, looked blank. It was almost as though she had no face at all.

  "Don't move," Kathleen feebly commanded. But suddenly, in her mind, she saw the cat clock.

  tick tick tick. The eyes switching back and forth. The plastic tail roving...

  tick tick tick

  The woman slowly reached for the huge pistol which lay on the castered stand full of surgical instruments.

  "Don't move!" Kathleen yelled.

  The little g
un in her hand was shaking. Nevertheless, the woman's hand fell away from the huge revolver.