by Brett Adams
I will never forget the first time I chambered a bullet, aimed the gun, and pulled the trigger.
The explosion was like discovering a new color. A new primal force in the world. It was as different from when the cop shot a mirror in the St Pancras Station restroom as watching fireworks is to being fireworks. I was the killing force; the killing force was me. Because I had caused it. Squeezed the trigger and brought the angel of death to life.
Well, angel of noise. Which is mostly what I achieved for the first thousand rounds of ammunition. My first target was a spruce pine in South Carolina. Recoil snapped my arm away from the tree each time, and my brain was slow to catch on. By the time I’d finished that day, I was plugging it reliably at ten paces. Next day, different tree, I was sinking rounds into the same head-sized knot reliably at fifteen.
After the trees, I graduated to setting empty soda cans on the hood of a rusted Ford Ranger, which had once been puke yellow, barely twenty paces from my feet.
This practice became routine, and I soon realized I need not find so secluded a place to practice with the weapon. I stacked empty cans on burned out cars, rotting fence posts, and once, a cracked toilet cistern and bowl that had somehow grown moss. In a place just south of the Virginia border, kids appeared and watched me take potshots at my cans lined up on the edge of a wrecked dumpster. They cheered when I finally obliterated Dr Pepper at forty paces. I grinned at that, blew the air from the end of the barrel like a cowboy, spun the gun by its trigger guard and holstered it.
On the rare times I couldn’t find empty cans, I shot up trees like the hippie anti-Christ.
All this time I never forgot Hiero’s deadline. The clock was ticking at the back of my mind with an insistence that crept into my dreams. But I’d had enough of blindly rushing in. This time I would arrive eyes wide open.
I sighted along the barrel at Hiero’s head.
If anything the tremor in my hands was growing worse. There was no way I was going to get a clean killing shot from across the street. The cover of the shadowed stoop I had so assiduously chosen would have to be abandoned. The wind eddying in my hiding place chilled the sweat on my neck, and I realized something I’d known for days now. In order to put an end to this, to kill Hiero—make sure of it—I would have to get up close, do it point blank. This really was the end of my life.
Adrenaline surged as I uncoiled from my hiding place. It propelled me forward so fast I felt I was watching someone else dash across the street. It was another man whose shoes slapped on the asphalt, then the cement sidewalk, ducked beneath the bough of a planetree, and took one last sighter on the target before raising his gun. That man was surprised how light the gun felt now. How light everything felt.
The gun settled, finally stood rock still in my grip.
A memory of a hallucination—the ghost of a ghost—picked that moment to assault me: “Dad, you’re no killer.”
I hesitated—could I hug my daughter again with these hands if I pulled the trigger?
Two things happened at once that shocked me back into the moment.
A girl emerged from further inside the café, passed in front of Hiero, spoiling my shot, and sat across from him.
And a voice spoke in my ear. “Act Three, Jack.”
The first signal of something deeply wrong was a spreading sensation moving from my bowels to my throat. My brain was just beginning to catch up with my body as I turned dumbly to find a face grinning at me from beneath the peak of a New York Yankees cap. The face caused a tug of recognition, but before I could place it, he said: “Give me the gun.”
Ignoring him, I twisted to see if the girl had moved, if I had a clear shot at Hiero, and the realization finally hit home.
The girl at his table was Tracey. My daughter. I was too late.
She was facing the street through the glass. Her expression was of complete surprise. Her mouth framed one word: “Dad?”
“Come on, Jack.” Said the voice, breath warm on my skin, and its owner laid a hand on my shoulder. “Do I need to spell it out? Think of the children.”
I tore my eyes from my daughter, turned to the man—boy. Through the welter of colliding thoughts I marked his jeans, jacket, cap. And a laptop bag hanging from a strap over his thin shoulders.
The smell of cigarette smoke clung to him. It evoked a memory of swaying carriages and autumnal fields. For a moment I was back on the train from Vienna to Paris, when Jane had still been alive, and I had been so close to Hiero.
Or so I had thought.
It was the laptop that closed the final circuit breaker in my mind.
In a flash I remembered a passenger seated alone in a compartment, a New York Yankees cap, bent over a laptop.
“Who the hell are you?” I breathed, even as he took the gun from my numb fingers.
He smiled, and it had a bit of Hiero in it.
“Me? I’m no one. I guess you could say I’m Hiero’s ghostwriter.”
A phone buzzed, and he retrieved it.
“Slow?” he said into the phone, irritated. “How about I just let him shoot you next time? No one would see that ending coming.”
69
Marten had always thought humans were strange, from as far back as kindergarten, when Joey Baldwin had earnestly informed her that his penis had a name, and he would talk to it in the toilet cubicle.
But for a town to take pride in a mass murder—even a mass murder older than living memory. To turn it for tourist dollars. ‘Strange’ no longer covered it.
This happened in the immediate wake of the Lawson family murders of Christmas 1929, when entrepreneurial Germanton residents opened the Lawson home to tourists at twenty-five cents a pop. Visitors souvenired sultanas from the Christmas cake Marie Lawson had baked, which would never be eaten.
Fast-forward almost a century and things weren’t so crass. Now you could visit the Charlie Lawson museum, twenty miles over in Madison, housed on the second floor of what was once the funeral home where the bodies of the Lawson family were embalmed. You could sit in a recreation of the main room and imagine those frantic last moments of life, quivering with terror as you sought a hiding place from your father and his shotgun.
Marten sighed, and swallowed the last of her coffee, warming her hands on the mug. Her gaze flicked between the empty main street and the face of Hiero Beck staring up at her from the photo by her saucer. What the hell had she hoped for here, anyway?
She remembered Grover’s reaction once she caught up with him after her ‘apology’. It had been touch and go—“Fine, Marten. Your bridges are burning, but what do you want?”—but here she was. In the end, the extent of the help to Germanton was an upgraded ticket on Delta from La Guardia to Garden City, and permission to carry her Glock, itself a legacy of her time with the FBI.
And when she’d finally driven into Germanton, a ‘town’ of 827 folk, what had she hoped to find? A kind of lodestone, calling its child, Hieronymus Beck, Randall Todd—home after all this time?
The place added a visceral jolt to the imaginary world of a mass murder, but not much else. She was able to confirm that Arthur Lawson, the only surviving member of the family, had four children before he died in a car accident at age 32. But they were all accounted for, and none bore the surname Todd.
That left a child born out of wedlock, who would be nearly impossible to track down in formal records. This is where living memory became the only resource, but—and Marten gazed at the forlorn street—there wasn’t a lot of living left in this town.
“Can I get you anything else, Honey?”
“I’m fine, thanks,” Marten said, and twisted to meet the waitress’s eyes. The habit was a human touch she cultivated in herself. It helped her to not see people as cogs.
But the woman’s gaze was transfixed by something on the table.
Grasping, Marten asked: “You know this boy?”
“He’s no boy,” she said, and took Marten’s cup from her fingers.
Marten rose and foll
owed her inside.
The inside of the café was empty like the street outside, save for an elderly lady propped in a chair by the window, scratching with a pen at a crossword. A solitary ceiling fan beat futilely at the tepid air, fighting with a steaming bain marie.
Marten followed the waitress until she passed through a flip-counter and disappeared with Marten’s dirty dishes into the kitchen.
“You piss my niece off?”
The old lady’s words so shocked Marten she lifted a hand too late to hide a smile.
“I can tell,” the lady continued without looking up from the crossword. “She drops her heels on the floor like river stones.”
“I didn’t mean to,” said Marten, coming over to the table. “She saw this.” Marten placed the photo of Hiero on the table beside the crossword.
The lady glanced at it. The only response Marten noticed was a slight deepening in the creases gathered above her brow. Her pen moved again, scratching in missing letters for Five Across, An impressive array: Panoply.
The waitress returned. “Go on then.” She stood leaning against a wall behind the counter, arms crossed, gaze fixed on her aunty.
The pen stilled, and the old lady looked up properly for the first time. She gestured with one hand for Marten to sit.
“What did she tell you?” said the old lady. “You can call me ‘Rose’.”
Marten shook the proffered hand, feeling the flesh curiously soft beneath dry skin. “Nothing, really. Only that Randall was—is no boy.”
“Ah. Well, it’s right there, at the start, where we differ.” She put the pen down, and lowered her glasses to peer at Marten over their thick rims. “And why are you interested in the boy?” placing an emphasis on the last word.
“You have to ask, Rosie?” said the waitress, and she scrubbed angrily at the counter with a rag. “Trouble. That’s why you’re sniffing after him, isn’t that right, Miss . . .?”
“It’s Marten. And, yes, there’s been some trouble.” Trouble. That didn’t begin to cover it.
Marten felt Rose’s gaze settle on her, calculating. “What do you do, Miss Marten, if I might ask?”
Intuition told Marten that the truth would play best. “I’m a profiler for the City of London Police. I construct psychological profiles from crime scene evidence, or of persons of interest to better predict their behavior—”
“I know what a profiler is, Miss Marten.”
Marten glanced at the nearly complete crossword, and accepted the rebuke. “I’m working alongside the FBI”—A slight stretch. Marten squirmed—“to find Randall before . . .”
“More trouble,” offered Rose.
Marten nodded.
“Kid’s middle name,” muttered the waitress, worrying at the countertop without seeming to realize her confession.
A car trundled up the main street, reminding Marten that while time might flow like treacle in Germanton, North Carolina, it still flowed. She couldn’t skirt the true nature of her visit any longer. She weighed her next words—
Rose beat her to it. “It’s murder, isn’t it? Not just one.”
Marten’s mouth hung open, and she stared at her.
The old woman pressed on, her sclerotic grey gaze somehow piercing. “For the FBI to be involved it’s terrorism, or children, or serial murders. And I wouldn’t imagine profilers travel across state to profile witnesses.”
“The FBI,” said Marten when she finally gathered her wits, “to the extent they’re interested, are looking for a man named Jack Griffen. I’m a little off the reserve here.”
“You think it’s Randall,” Rose stated, matter-of-fact.
The waitress appeared at Marten’s shoulder, wringing the rag in her hands.
“Murder, Rose? I mean, he was an arrogant, self-absorbed little sonofabitch, but . . .”
Rose’s pen was scratching again, and her head was down, but—marvelously, to Marten’s mind—she began talking as though her concentration were wholly on Marten.
“I knew he was trouble the moment I laid eyes on him. I remember it clearly. He was standing over the bar of a bicycle at the gas station. He pulled a plastic wine glass from his backpack, poured from a bottle, and drank. He tipped his head back and must have swallowed half of it in one go. Then he swiveled his head to take in the place, and saw me watching. He winked at me.”
A chuckle like rustling leaves escaped the bent over head. “You can call it wise after the fact, but maybe it was intuition.”
“If you thought he was trouble,” said the waitress, “why the hell did you invite him back here for lunch?”
The force in her words made Marten look up. Tears stood in her eyes.
“Because, Jessie, the world would be a better place if less people did something with trouble other than always running from it.”
“Yeah, well maybe you shouldn’t get to make that decision for everybody.” Jessie stormed into the kitchen. Only Marten saw Rose’s arthritis-swollen finger lift to her face and come away wet.
“Could you tell me where Randall lived? Short of canvassing the streets, I’m lost. And time is short.”
“Randall didn’t live in Germanton,” said Rose, filling crossword squares with her neat capitals.
“But—”
“That first day I saw him, he’d ridden from Winston. His mother had moved them there weeks before, got herself a job with R.J. Reynolds, Big Tobacco, and Randall had enrolled at a film school in Winston. It took him that long to learn of the Christmas murders.”
“So you know about Hiero—I’m sorry—Randall’s history?”
“From before he and his mother moved to Winston? Can’t say I do. Only that he came with a tan, and a mongrel accent.”
Exasperation sharpened Marten’s tone. “But it can’t be a coincidence that Randall is related to the Lawsons.”
“No, it’s no coincidence,” Rose said equably. “It’s not true.”
“But—”
“You know, Miss Marten, for a profiler you do a lot of talking and not a lot of listening.”
Marten suffered the rebuke with a silent nod.
“Randall Todd,” Rose went on, “appeared on the streets of Germanton, and tried that story on a few of us. Most didn’t believe him. And at first it seemed he’d just made it up from whole cloth to impress Jessie’s daughter, my great niece, Kelsie. They became thick as thieves.” For the first time, Rose hesitated. “And, that part, I don’t understand.”
“What part?”
“Why he had to involve Kelsie at all. There must have been plenty of girls at the university. Why did he pick her to play out his fantasy? What did she have to do with his father?”
“His father?”
“He was fascinated by the Lawson murder. The murders—how a father could kill his own family in cold blood, his own children. But even more, how the same father could spare one son. Randall was desperate to know what about that boy, in his father’s eyes, had caused his father to send him to town that Christmas day while he obliterated his family.”
“I’m sorry,” Marten felt a headache beginning to pulse at the back of her neck. “Whose father? The Lawson boy or Randall’s?”
Rose laughed unhappily. “Both, I guess. He talked about the Lawson father, but his own father was a hole in every conversation I ever had with that boy. The bruise you don’t touch. The question in his eyes.
“He confessed to me once—very out of character. Perhaps I reminded him of someone he’d trusted, that he would be so vulnerable. He told me his father once said to him, ‘I didn’t marry to have children. I married to have a wife.’ How about that?”
Rose’s eyes were wide with remembered shock.
“I got the rest from Randall’s mother. His father had given over his job altogether to go hang around police stations in Los Angeles, listening to the police radio, pestering journalists. Looking for the next serial killer maybe. Randall was just another inconvenience.”
Rose filled the last clear squares of t
he crossword with her crisp capitals and laid her pen down.
“Terrorism, child abuse, fraud. None of that fits Randall. But murder? He wrapped himself in it. I wish it surprised me. But it doesn’t.”
There was meaning here, connected, twisting, just beyond Marten’s grasp. She could sense it. But right then, all she could think was: Griffen, what the hell are you tangled in?
“So,” Marten said at last. “What exactly did Randall do here?”
Rose leant forward. “You’ve heard of YouTube?”
70
The first words out of Hiero’s mouth when I met him for the very first time were, “I feel like I already know you.”
People say that if they’re being glib. They might also say it if they have an intimate view into your life.
Hiero is many things, but he is not glib.
71
“It’s Marten, Kim. Please don’t hang up. I’m clutching at straws. The more I learn, the less I know.”
“Oh, you came around, huh?”
She didn’t sound smug. Just resigned.
“If you mean, do I think Jack is telling the truth: yes. But he can only tell what he knows … It’s the rest of this mess I can’t understand.”
“I’d love to help, Inspector Lacroix, but what do you think I know that you don’t?”
“You know Jack, Kim.” Marten sighed in exasperation. “It has to be something about him. I’m looking for a motive, any motive—even one that makes sense to a psychotic mind. What would drag Hiero halfway round the world to attempt such an elaborate sting. I mean, what is it about Jack?”
“I don’t know what else I can say. Jack? Well, he gave me the greatest gift in my life: Tracey. And then, he left . . .”
Marten heard a muffled thump behind Kim’s words.
