Empathy

by John Richmond

  “Hubris,” Samuels said. “Amazing.”

  “Not for a sociopath,” Charlie said.

  “Oh, yeah?” Bilko raised an eyebrow.

  “Yeah, when you’ve worked as many shifts on the psych ward as I have you learn a thing or two. Pure sociopaths are rare but interesting cats. One of the things that allows them to do the things they do also tends to be the one thing that gets them caught.”

  “Hubris?” Emily said.

  “Sort of, but it goes way deeper than that. Apparently, a lot of these people don’t really understand that other people, or even the world, exist outside of them. They think they’re the only real people. Imagine what you might do with your life if you believed on some deep, unconscious level that you were the only real person, like you were really just walking around on like a holodeck from Star Trek.”

  “I don’t think I’d kill anyone,” Emily said.

  Charlie smiled. “No, of course not. Neither would I or Mr. Samuels or Michael or the Detective.”

  “Oh, I might whack a few moles.” Bilko said.

  “But the reason we wouldn’t spend all that time killing people, even if we didn’t believe they were real, is because we don’t also have some kind of serious rage or psycho-sexual dysfunction. You mix in that kind of stuff along with the pure sociopathology and you get someone who goes around killing for the hell of it.”

  “Okay,” Bilko said. “That’s about as close to anything I’ve ever read or heard from a police shrink, or even out of Behavioral Sciences at Quantico. But now tell me why they do it in such particular ways. Where do the M.O.s come from? Why not just shoot people if your goal is to kill. That’d be easier.”

  “Sure, but it wouldn’t get them off. Just walking around inside a holodeck zapping people with a phaser would get old. But what if you’ve got some weird fixation with fear? What if you could kill someone by scaring the shit out of them? That would take some planning. That would take some serious time and effort.”

  “You think he planned out what he did with me,” Michael said, voice even quieter than before.

  Charlie thought for a moment. “I dunno’, man. Maybe, but from what you said it sounded like he just got lucky and recognized you on a street corner. He knew you were going to a heart specialist, right? Had an office right across the hall from your doctor?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, so he probably wouldn’t have picked you as a planned target. Too close to home.”

  “So why then?” Bilko asked.

  “I guess that he just couldn’t pass up the opportunity. Let’s not forget if Michael hadn’t gotten away from him, Fine would still be at it. You were still looking at cardiac physicians, right Detective?”

  Bilko nodded.

  “God, it’s all so precarious,” Emily said.

  “What?” Samuels asked.

  “Life.”

  Bilko said, “Well, that’s an interesting theory and it’ll give me some discussion questions to go over with the good doctor Fine, but I have one more question, Scooby Gang.” Everyone looked at her. “How do you all know each other?”

  “Well, Mr. Samuels is the doorman from my hotel.” Emily started, “I rode in the ambulance with him to this hospital when he had his heart attack, and I met Charlie in the lobby.”

  Charlie picked it up. “While we were standing there, Michael drove the cab up and just barely made it through the front doors.”

  Bilko smiled. That explained Michael’s “dream” about the two young lovers; he obviously incorporated a memory of them from the lobby as he was losing consciousness.

  “Michael, how did you say you knew Mr. Samuelson?”

  Samuels kept quiet. She was just messing with him now and he wasn’t about to rise to the bait. He shook his head and smirked.

  “I dreamed about him,” Michael said. His eyebrows furrowed. “It wasn’t a good dream. There was a…” Michael’s brow furrowed. “A—a shadow man.”

  Emily glanced up.

  Bilko stared at her pad for a moment, then flipped it closed. She couldn’t write that shit down. Poor kid had probably included some of the outside world into his coma as he was coming out of it; saw the old guy standing over him or something and incorporated that into his dream.

  Her phone chirped. Bilko flipped it open against her head. “Bilko, go.”

  Emily sensed it before Bilko’s muscles pushed her up out of her chair—an aura of needles around the cop. Bilko stood next to the bed, the chair knocked out from underneath her, the phone plastered to her ear. The room was quiet except for the tiny voice scratching unintelligible from the phone. After a moment she hung up. The phone hung open in her hand at her side.

  “Crap,” she said.

  ~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 16

  DRUM SAT ON the couch, the one he’d bought from Pottery Barn after a patient raved about the buttery-soft cow hide. And it was soft, it was. Felt like lounging on a giant tit swathed in scar tissue. The shades were drawn and the TV sprayed light around the room in sheets of flickering blue, but no sound. When television characters spoke it made Drum think of corpses he had known, blurring air past their teeth in a last moan. Empty imitations of life. Everything was, really. You learned that in med school. Everything we were just lead up to the same natural conclusion. Time was the only separation and according to the physics geeks time wasn’t even real. Drum was different though, electrified with life and something else. The TV flickered. So did his eyes.

  He felt the officers on the other side of the door before they even rapped against the steel. He could always tell a cop. That bath of old insecurity and anger, depression so ingrained it was like sawdust caught under varnish. Drum loved cops.

  Rap, rap, rap. Very authoritative. Drum nodded and snickered. “Coming!”

  He placed his hand on the door and stopped. The moment he turned the deadbolt everything would change. No more hiding. No more pretending to be just one of them. He craned his neck around the foyer: mahogany wall table crowned with an empty Waterford vase, etching of a 19th Century operating theatre, the healer in the center up to his elbows in some faceless cadaver. Pewter frame. He liked that frame. His fingers on the brass doorknob were warm, the blood within them an intent. He twisted.

  “Doctor Drummond Fine?” Big kid, beefy, twenties, already regretting his decision to join up. Under the cap his hair would be jar-head short. Partner stood next to and behind a step: woman, thirties, tired through the marrow. She was addicted to something. Radio hand-sets sprouted from their shoulders, turned low, crackling. The woman made eye contact with Drum and was smart enough to come full awake.

  “We have a warrant for your arrest, sir,” she said.

  Drum looked at them each in turn. “Of course,” he said. “I’m ready.”

  Handcuffs gleamed in the kid’s hand. “Turn around, please, sir.”

  “You don’t need to try so hard, son,” Drum said.

  “Just turn around.”

  “Certainly.” Drum showed them his back. He got a look at the handmade saltillo tile leading into his apartment, the charcoal grout between each red stone. He’d always liked the way they felt on his bare feet. Easy to clean, too. Metal ratcheted behind him. The cuffs were warm on his wrists where the young cop had gripped them. He hadn’t made them too tight, but Drum could feel his desire to do so. It was a good bet that if this officer had the chance his next arrest would be peppered with a little brutality. A face smashed down on the hood of a car perhaps, the cuffs cinched tight enough to turn fingers blue. A billyclub into a kidney or shin bone.

  “Turn back around, please.”

  Drum walked in front and lead them to the elevator past the door numbers of neighbors he’d spoken less than three words to in as many years. New York. He heard the female cop close his apartment door. “Thank you,” he said.

  She didn’t answer.

  Drum reached the elevator doors and watched a beefy, freckled arm reach past and mash the down button. They all w
aited. Drum whistled and rocked back and forth in his loafers. The kid’s anger was crystallizing around a nugget of frustration. Why hadn’t the suspect asked them any questions or protested? It was freaky, him just going along like this. Everyone had something to say.

  Ding.

  The building was old, the elevator walls pressed against shoulders, arms, clunked against sidearms. None of them touched one another. Drum still whistled. No specific song, just the sound of air over teeth and through a focused mouth. Flat notes. Drum imagined he could hear their hearts beating.

  Ding.

  The door slid open. Mrs. Menendez stood holding an empty canvas shopping bag, her hair a salt and pepper bun, the odd wisp at her temple. At the sight of Drum with the Policia she pulled the bag to her flattened breasts. Her fingers constricted around the handles. “Doctor Fine,” she said, eyes growing, catching on badges and guns.

  “Parking tickets,” Drum said.

  The woman cop punched the door closed button. “Sorry, ma’am.”

  The doors started to slide together. Mrs. Menendez called, “When joo get a car?”

  The side of armed beef shook his head. Could the general public get any stupider? Where would these people be without the police they hated so much? A lot of them would be dead, anyway, like this asshole’s victims. The kid glanced sideways at the suspect. Skinny, half-blind freak. The Phobia Killer. How could a jerk like this scare anyone to death? They all grew heavy for an instant as the elevator came to a stop.

  Ding.

  Drum led the cops through the lobby. An African American man watched them from behind the front desk, his bald head throwing reflections over the rim of his newspaper. Drum stopped at the lobby doors.

  “Keep moving, sir.” The kid said.

  “Halston?”

  The newspaper dropped. “Doctor Fine?”

  The kid put a hand on the butt of his pistol. “I said to keep moving.”

  “Please stop my mail.” Drum turned around and faced the officers. “And call the police.”

  The woman cop smelled something coming. She unsnapped her holster and hauled out a Glock bigger than both of her hands put together. “Turn around, sir.”

  “You’ll do that for me, won’t you, Halston?”

  “She said turn around, shit-head!” The kid yanked his gun and fell into a stance. Fear and pride pulsed off him like radio waves. They splashed up against Drum and he smiled, eyes half-lidded.

  At the sight of the drawn weapons, Halston withered behind the desk. “I’ll do that, Dr. Fine. Stop your mail. Sure,” he called.

  “And call the police.”

  Halston frowned. “But they’re here, sir.”

  Drum shook his head. “You’ll need to call more.”

  He closed his eyes and thought about blood and pumping and stopping that, about squeezing. In the darkness, he heard their gasps and grunts, the clatter of guns dropped on marble. He opened his eyes, burning blank coins. Both officers clutched their chests, eyes as big as saucers, shot with capillaries that were already deflating. Terror, the silent death pathos, the realization of what came next smashed into Drum as each of them folded into blue puddles.

  The big cop was dead before the flesh of his face even spread on the cold floor. His nose crunched. Drum looked at the woman. She was close, just slipping beyond the point of no return; blacking out and no longer afraid, but worried. Drum wondered what a person at the edge of her life could possibly have to worry about. They were usually wrapped in a writhing blanket of fear. Common worry was a new one on him. Then the answer came in a wave of remorse—a taste of motherhood. Who would take care of her little ones, now?

  Drum stopped squeezing. His left hand jittered at his side.

  The officer’s eyelids fluttered above crescents of moist white. She let out a long breath, unconsciousness pulling her under. Drum stood over her, leaned down and picked up her gun. He hefted it, turned it this way and that, admired the almost deco quality, the smart machine design. But this was a blunt instrument compared with what he could do. He noticed what had to be the safety switch, a little button with a red strip on the side. He pressed it back in and felt the trigger lock up under his finger. He stuffed the pistol in his belt, snickering at himself. Look Ma, I’m a cowboy.

  “Halston,” he said.

  “Sir?” came from behind the desk.

  “Please help me carry this officer to her vehicle.”

  Halston didn’t answer.

  Drum sighed, his shoulders slumped. “Halston, come out here and help me or I’ll kill you like I killed this policeman. Do it quickly.”

  Five minutes later, Halston was backing away from the patrol car parked in front of the building. He could just see that poor police-lady spread out in the back seat. Her police hat had fallen off. She had long red hair in a pony tail. She looked like a girl napping on the way home from a long day on the road with her folks. Doctor Fine sat in the driver’s seat, but he didn’t look like her daddy.

  “Halston?”

  “Yes, Doctor Fine.”

  “When you call the police, tell them you want to speak with Detective Bilko.”

  “Yessir.” Halston frowned. “Like that old show?”

  Drum smiled. “That’s right. You tell her what I’ve done and that I’ll be in contact soon.”

  “I will.”

  “Thank you, Halston.”

  * * *

  NEW JERSEY, JUST over the river was not the most horrible place in the world. The empty warehouse was not the most vermin-infested hole. Drummond Fine was not the most insane man. But all three could have placed damn close in the finals.

  Sharon Dimke swam back into consciousness not wondering where her two young children were, not wondering about her punk-kid of a partner or about why she was coming back to consciousness in the first place. Her primary concern had to do with her other child. The one she didn’t actually love, but who held the most sway. Before she even opened her eyes, Officer Dimke felt the absence in her hip pocket. “Pills,” she muttered.

  A male voice echoed in the big, empty space. “Oh,” it said. “You mean these?” Sound of a plastic maraca.

  Sharon opened her eyes then. Brown and watery, they snap-locked on the amber plastic bottle. There were Oxycontin tablets rattling around in that bottle. Five. Perfect. Beautiful. Pills. The teeth of her other baby.

  “How’d you get hooked, officer?”

  The pills were talking to her? Wouldn’t be the first time. The outlines of the bottle sharpened. Her heart sped up a bit and she winced. Her chest hurt, like it was bruised from the inside out. What had it said? Something about cooked? No, it wasn’t the bottle. She saw the fingers now, long and white, clutching her child by the neck. That’s who was talking, the person at the end of those fingers was asking her something.

  “What?” she said. “What?”

  Drum leaned back on the crate he was sitting on and giggled. “How’d you get hooked,” he flipped open her wallet and squinted in the gloom at her ID, “Sharon?”

  If she had been one of those bug-eyed lizards on the Discovery Channel that change color, Sharon would have left one eye on the bottle while tracking the other along the arm that held it to the source of the voice. Thick rimless glasses and eyes, gray and glowing like uranium, floated in the dark. Now, she remembered. Oh, shit.

  Drum felt her realization and the fear that came with it. He could use that, but the officer had deeper concerns to exploit. He stuck out his lower lip and considered the label on the bottle. “Oxycontin a nice high, Sharon? I hear it is.”

  A moan rose from the deepest parts of her gut but she bit it off.

  Three years ago, before Bruce left and took the kids with him, she had been studying for the sergeant’s exam and it had been easy going. She was poised to be one of the youngest female sergeants in NYPD history. From there it would be straight on to detective. Sharon Dimke had been a natural at thinking around corners and when it came to taking down the bad guys she’
d proven an absolute badass. Everyone said so, even the lieutenant that one time. Not big, like a lot of the other women cops she knew. Trucks with tits some of them. Sharon was more like a bullet. Little and quick and precise. She didn’t have a lot of weight in her five foot four frame, but she only had to hit you once to get you to see things her way. She knew how to do nasty things with kneecaps and thumbs.

  “Sharon,” Drum said. “We have a great deal of time to kill, I’m afraid. I think we should get to know each other better in the interim. Now, I’ve always thought the best way to do that was to dispense with small talk. I hate that kind of mindless banter. In my experience, the best way to do that is go into the parts of one’s life that have the greatest weight.”

  Her eyes drifted back to the bottle. It seemed to have a weak glow, like a dying firefly was trapped inside.

  “I could start with myself,” Drum continued. “But I really think that the most important thing about me will come as something of a surprise to you. Surprises are always best kept for last, don’t you think?”

  Sharon tried to sit up. Her left hand was manacled to a rusted pipe with her own cuffs. She slid the cuff up the pipe a bit and was able to sit back against the wall. She sighed. Her chest hurt a little less now, but it still felt like a firecracker had gone off in her ribcage. This was the part where the police shrink they made her go see would tell her that she should just let go. There was nothing she could do. Her weapons and belt were coiled like a cybernetic snake next to the crate this asshole was sitting on, just out of her reach. The air reeked of mold and foul water, rats and dust. Even the urine stench was old. Bums didn’t even come here anymore, wherever the hell here was. There was only enough light filtering through the grime on the windows to tell her that night was on its way.

  Drum felt her give in, saw it echoed in her face. “Now,” he said, “tell me how you got hooked.”

  She tipped her chin at the bottle. “Can I have one of those first?”

  Drum glanced at the bottle as if it had just materialized in his hand. “What? One of these?” He rattled it.