“Serial killers?” Richard asked absently while checking his phone for messages.
“Well, the Mister killings have definitely brought the topic back into the public consciousness.”
“He hasn't been caught yet. There will certainly be much more to talk about once he has.”
“What if he's never caught?” Presely asked.
“He'll get caught. They always do. And when he does, we will know who he is and where he came from. Until then, how in the hell could we possibly spread that story into four hours?”
“It could be about serial killers in general,” somebody vaguely important suggested.
“American serial killers,” someone else chimed.
“There's plenty of content if we go that general with it. One segment can cover the history of serial killers, Jack the Ripper and so on, and then an entire segment just for serial killers in America.”
Richard put down his phone and lifted his hand up to silence all the nonsense.
“Okay, first of all, that’s only two segments. Four hours on that topic is a bit of a push. Not to mention it’s just a little...I don’t know…What's the word I'm looking for here, kids...‘hacky?’ This is really what we want to talk about? We can choose any topic, any topic at all and this is what we're discussing? Mister? As I said, the guy hasn't been caught yet. There are a lot of friends and family out there affected by this thing and covering it feels like rubbing salt in the wounds doesn't it?”
This shut everyone up but Richard could tell Timothy Froshber was mulling it over and he found that more than a little worrisome.
Froshber, a.k.a. The Head Honcho, was an iron fist kind of guy who wielded his control over you with such passive aggression and casual determination that you didn't even realize he had that iron fist until he was done fisting you with it and had lit a cigarette. Presley had his hairy old ear. Froshber thought he was the voice of the informed youth or something, and Richard knew him well enough to know that he was considering this stupid serial killer idea.
Presley must have picked up on it too. That little shit.
“Just because it's sensational doesn't mean it's not a valid topic. Murder is a very real and a very important part of our cultural discourse. Law and society began to form as a direct result of man's violent impulses towards one another. Murder is as old as recorded history. Hell, Cain slew Abel. True or not, it's metaphorical that murder has always been a part of human society.”
“Hmmm,” Head Honcho said, and Richard could suddenly see this slipping away from him if he didn't speak up.
“This isn't news! There are much more important conversations we can and should be having. How about the growing political polarization of the county? How about climate change? This isn't Unsolved Mysteries.”
“Like listeriosis was ground breaking news?” Presley quipped.
“Look here, you little up-start…”
“—Whoah! Whoah, let's just take it easy,” Head Honcho said. “The reason we have these meetings is to get a dialogue going, not to win or lose.”
And then the Head Honcho looked directly at Richard, the way a parent looks at a child as if it say, do you want me to pull your pants down right here and spank you? What he wouldn’t have given to be able to punch his boss right smack in his surgically lifted face, and then broken a chair over Presley’s head. The little prat. Richard’s heart was pounding so hard in his chest he began to feel jumpy. He counted to ten.
“Fine. Serial killers. Mister. I'll give it some thought,” Richard said as calmly as he could. “What else do we got?”
“How about 'The End of Money'?” someone suggested, hanging finger quotes over the title. “What the world would look like after a total economic collapse.”
The day was long and tedious, as all his days had become. His nightly broadcast wrapped at seven and he was on the road by seven-ten. In his head, he had told off Presley and Head Honcho a hundred times that day. Sometimes he found it difficult not to obsess over things that were troubling him. But he wasn't going to let them ruin his rediscovered optimism... Richard Lansdown: optimist. That was news indeed, he thought with a snort. And then it suddenly hit him like a Newtonian dropkick to the head. He was a newsman, but there was, in fact, nothing new about what he had been doing with his career. The things he reported on weren’t news. The fact that the world was fucked up had become a forgone conclusion a long time ago. The world was, it seemed, a dying planet. A place of incalculable suffering and strife, whose existence hinged on any number of disasters which would, in a best case scenario, “destroy our very way of life” or in the worst case, simply destroy our lives. One after another, the endless parade of looming catastrophes hung over the heads of average Americans every day. What luxurious or even simple comforts, striven for and attained by them, was made to seem like a bubble whose bursting was one jihadists explosion, one super bird influenza away.
Richard was not a naive man. He knew that there was a whole lot of wrong in the world, he knew it more than most. It was his stock-in-trade after all. For decades now he had chronicled the looming dangers and disasters of the world. But he wondered how much of all that negativity and bleakness was not so because they framed people’s world-views by sensationalizing the dangers in the first place. How could the world dig itself out of the hole of twenty-first century apathy when the media was overwhelmingly clear that resistance was futile? The apocalypse was inevitable. Like someone who is diagnosed with aggressive cancer and given but a year to live: why not take up smoking? Hell, why not take up heroin?
But did it have to be that way? Might covering what was good and beautiful in the world, at least some of the time perhaps lighten the general public’s worldview? And wouldn’t that, in turn, ‘trickle down’, to use modern political parlance, to create a little bit of optimism and hope?
And that was when he had his epiphany. Perhaps the greatest epiphany of his life: those who report the news have an obligation to report the positives as well as the negatives. They had a duty to inform people that there were many reasons to believe that everything will be okay. And he was sure there had to be plenty of stories that did just that, and would focus his specials on those. He would talk about breakthroughs in medical science and illustrate how close they must surely be by now, to curing some disease. He would shed light on growing political awareness and free thinking amongst youth around the world and discuss theories for alternative energy sources. He would frame the world, if just for a couple hours, as a place where human ingenuity and creativity would pave the way to a better tomorrow, not just for America but for all people. It was going to be great. He was going to do something truly good with what time he had left in his career. He was going to show the world that they could be better; he was going to show himself.
CHAPTER 11
Jeremy was wrong about the Prozac samples being in his office desk. It was Xanax. Even better.
The hangover from Xanax, or similar psychoactive drugs was not like the hangover from alcohol, which is often painful and uncomfortable. If anything it was the opposite. There was a certain numbness and sluggishness of thought, if taken very late that night before, that was waiting for you, if you managed to drag your ass out of bed the next morning despite the inevitable yearning not too.
Only Jeremy wasn’t in bed when he groggily wiped the sleep from his eyes and sat up. He was in couch. The leather of his office sofa clung to his skin as he peeled himself off of it like a hunk of resurrected road kill. His tongue sat heavily in his mouth like a snail sun-fried in its shell. Dry mouth really was a side effect, he thought and hoped none of the other side effects were present also. Of course though the ominous list was only a concern from extended use and no cause for real concern from his brief overnight forays into the pharmaceutical nebulum.
The first thing his punch drunk mind did as it slowly whirled on like the battered hard drive of an old computer was to restate the present situation to himself: His twin brother was dead, he had
no clue how to relate to his son or his estranged wife and he was, as always, slowly but surely drowning, one cold gulp of reality at a time.
He tried to get to his feet but lost the will to do so en route and remained like that for several minutes, slouched forward, his head hanging low between his knees as though the heaviness of this thoughts made his skull too burdensome of a load for his spine.
Somewhere a clock ticked.
He whispered a single word to himself not knowing why or having the awareness to wonder. “Xanax.”
He wasn’t sure how he felt about the difficulty it took to think under the drugs misuse. Or was it a misuse? No, it was not recreational he reminded himself. It was most definitely clinical treatment. knowing that however, didn’t make the effort required to conjure up real thoughts any less frustrating.
In the nebulum all thoughts were half thoughts. Shades of the concepts your mind wanted to define and give shape to but couldn’t. You ended up with vapours of thoughts which seemed as though they just barely breach the membrane of the conscience mind. Though one thought in particular was insistent enough to keep bubbling to the surface: Coffee... coffee... coffee.
He slowly began to scan the room for his shirt. He didn’t remember taking it off and had no idea how he was able to sleep through the night shirtless and with the air conditioner blasting as it was but his body was sore and aching for it, especially his back which popped and cracked like a string of Chinese fire crackers as he straightened it upright.
He found his shirt hanging on the corner of his desk. The desk behind which he conducted so much of his good intentioned quackery. It seemed like an ancient relic to him now: Heavy and square. He could picture the well oiled surface of the cherry wood cracking and twisting to form a frowning mouth. Physician save thyself, it croaked mockingly.
Behind the desk was the small library of credibility enhancing text books. Books he must of read and memorized with sharp mental acuity, since look, here they are right behind his desk. Ramachandrian and Sacks, Ridley, Jung and Freud were all represented. And then of course the biggest credibility enhancer of all time; his doctorate of psychology and master of law from Berkeley university, both preserved like precious artefacts, framed and displayed predominantly on the wall.
Buttoning up the last button of his shirt he looked down at his watch and groaned. It was nine and his secretary Margret would be arriving soon and the parade of madness would begin its precession through the small office in slow hourly increments.
He knew taking more time off was probably the responsible thing to do. That maybe, just maybe, he was in his present state unfit to counsel anyone. But he was afraid of what would happen if he did let go of his responsibilities. It wasn’t distraction he needed. Helping the mentally ill navigate the haunted corners of their minds was hardly a reprieve for anything except maybe peace of mind. What he needed was accountability. He needed people who depended on him to keep his shit together. And at the realization of that, he literally swooned and had to steady himself against his desk to keep from fainting in despair. He needed people with sever mental illness to give him his sense of identity. Who or what would he be if he didn’t have a severely mentally ill brother and father? Madness was all around him and when he had a chance to escape it and go away to school, what did he do? He chose the one career which assured that he would always be a permanent fixture on the funny farm. Why?
It was far from the first time and definitely not the last, that he would ask himself that question. He had a somewhat extensive index of possible reasons ranging from guilt, to altruism to self hate even a brief but earnest consideration that he was actually languishing in purgatory. Before he had a chance to add another log to that fire, as it were, he realized it wasn’t a work day at all. He didn’t need to be there. In fact he couldn’t be there because although it technically wasn’t a work day, it was Sunday and on Sunday he had a long standing commitment to his most famous client.
He had been retired from the federal bureau of investigation for over three years when he was approached to assist with Victor Matherport, otherwise know as the Mister copy-cat. Matherport had already been apprehended at the time. He was caught in his dwelling; a basement apartment in south central, with the corpse of a young Asian boy stuffed into his freezer like an artistic homage to Jeffrey Dahmer. It wasn't until his arrest that it became clear there were two Mister killers employing the same modus operandi. The victims were all killed in their homes, and had their eyes removed and placed on the floor beneath their feet. However the killer taunting the police with videos was not Victor Matherport. They didn't know what murders to attribute to who, there were at least eight bodies undiscovered and Matherport proved to not be the chatty type. As a profiler with the special behavioural unit Jeremy had a reputation for being able to form a special report with the truly deranged. When they couldn't get Matherport to talk, they asked Jeremy to work his psycho magic.
It was slow going at first. Matherport had nothing to prove, he didn't strike Jeremy as someone who was trying to make a point, but after months of weekly meetings, which Matherport seemed to relish as he was in solitary confinement his entire stay and never had visitors, he finally divulged the location of his victims bodies, but not before making Jeremy swear he would continue to visit him every Sunday. Which seemed like a small price to pay to bring the family's of the deceased at least a small measure of solace. Truth be told he could simply have stopped going once the bodies were found, but he tried to keep his word when he could and the visits were often times the most interesting part of his week. How often does one get to study the mind of a true monster?
Jeremy spent the drive to Pelican Bay listening to talk radio because it kept his mind engaged and off of his brother. The discussion was a light little chat about late term abortions. There was no shortage of vitriol and of course no conclusion or consensus in sight. Which seemed to be about par for the course regarding every subject of American society lately. America was a country divided, civilization was crumbling, perhaps Chris had checked out just in time. He could picture him down there, in that box in the ground, decomposing like compost in the garden.
He changed the channel and listened to top forty for the remainder of the drive.
Pelican Bay is a grim intimidating facility which consists of staunch grey concrete structures, surrounded by a high voltage razor wire topped fence. By the time one passes through the thirty foot guarded gate and spot the steely eyed guards in the towers, their high powered carbine rifles in hand, one gets the point: Do not feed the animals.
The man at the visitor in-take desk was a generic looking C.O. who gave the impression that he had done his time deeper in the bowels of the beast and was now very thankful to be working such a menial and safe post.
As Jeremy approached, the corrections officer regarded him with recognition and reached for the clipboard to sign him in.
“Dr. Foster,” the guard burped and nodded a hello.
“Good to see you again,” Jeremy responded trying to remember the man's name and failing.
“Enter the Sally port to the right and wait for the door to lock.” The guard instructed as though Jeremy hadn’t done this dozens of times.
The ‘sally port’ is a foyer of sorts between two sets of magnetically locked iron doors. He entered and the door rolled shut behind him, locking with a loud klank. That klanking sound always interested him for some reason. How cruel that sound must seem to those imprisoned there. The doors rolled closed so silently and smoothly, that it made the sound all the more startling. They must be able to construct a system which would seal the doors in place more quietly. Could it be that, that sound was deliberate? Psychological reinforcement? He wouldn’t be surprised. We have you now convict. You’re not going anywhere any time soon. Klank!
The door in front of him opened and he proceeded down the long hall. The floors were polished, the walls were a clean clinical white, it smelled of pine-sol but he knew how incongruous this s
ection of the facility was with the prison proper.
Reaching another door a female corrections officer in another small control booth nodded a hello and hit a button or a lever or whatever and opened it for him.
He passed through. Klank!
Finally he came to the third desk where yet another guard directed him to an interview room to wait for Victor to be brought in.
The room had four large plexiglass mesh reinforced windows on each wall, so the occupants could be observed from all angles. There was a single table with a chair on either side of it. Jeremy chose the farthest to the door.
A whole ten minutes went by before Matherport was finally led to the room by two burly black guards and fastened to the empty chair at the table with leg restraints.
Victor Matherport was a grizzly bear. His massive head housed two intense eyes which burned down on you, probing for weakness. His wrists were as wide as baseball bats and his arms the size of an average man's thighs. His bottom lip was bloody and gnarled, and he obsessively bit at the soft and swollen flesh, until Jeremy couldn't stand the sight of it anymore. He waved the guards back in.
“Can we have his wounds dressed please?”
The burly guards just stared, annoyed, so Jeremy was forced to insist.
“We can't proceed until his wounds are dressed and covered.”
They more than anyone most have known the statistics of AIDS amongst the prison population and Jeremy was sure they would enjoy a mouth full of HIV spat into their faces just as little as he would. They unlocked him and took him to have his cut treated.
Another fifteen minutes later they returned, his lip now dressed and covered in gauze and a band aid. They re-chained him and left.
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