The Devil's Dream: Book One

by David Beers

  "Yes, sir. I'll call his lawyer here in a minute although I doubt he'll answer this late, but we should be in contact by tomorrow."

  "Fine. Anything else?" Art asked.

  "You were on this before? On the Brand case the first time?"

  "Yeah, more or less a foot soldier."

  "Were you there at the end, when they caught him?"

  "I was," Art said.

  "We're not going to catch him like that again, huh?"

  Art gave out a low chuckle. "Malone was the luckiest son of a bitch to ever live. The guy caught Brand and then retired to acclaim from everyone. Yeah, I doubt anything like that is going to happen this time. If it does, then I'll go on record as saying Brand's intelligence is simply overrated. That he might actually have some mild retardation. We're both going to have to put more work in than Malone did, I'm sure of that."

  Allison was smiling, listening to her superior talk about someone who could be looked at as a legend or as a joke, depending on how much you knew about the original Brand case.

  "Just one more thing, sir. Did you see him when you caught him?"

  "Yeah." The laughter disappeared from Art's voice.

  "What did he look like?"

  "Insane. He looked insane."

  Chapter Eight

  Despite the climate controlled storage units, Jeffrey was sweating. Had been sweating for the past ten hours. A gallon jug full of water sat on the flimsy table he had his chair pulled up to. This was his second session, the first ending the day before at ten p.m., and this one beginning twelve hours later. He was about half through his files, reading every single word he wrote down all those years ago. He listened to tapes, of the victims, of the cops that had chased Brand, of the officers testifying in court who were accused of murdering Hilman. Jeffrey was building up the story again, building up all the layers that had allowed him to write his novel, remembering what each person felt and the rage that had fueled the country back then.

  Jeffrey was also remembering what he hadn't known he could forget, the feelings Brand inspired. One could not read his story, understand his passion, and simply discard it as a disturbed individual. Jeffrey had loved a part of Brand back then, had understood him perhaps as well as any human could and with that understanding came a degree of caring.

  With all of this, he would be able to track down Matthew Brand.

  The phone on the desk rang and he looked down, pulling out of the daydreams consuming him. His lawyer's face showed on the screen.

  "Frank. What's going on?"

  "We got good news, buddy. The F.B.I. says it's a go. Says they'll feed you information if you answer their questions and tell them what you think. Do we have a yes?"

  Jeffrey looked out at the open boxes before him. Plastic bins containing a hundred lives, people that somehow opened up to a Columbia educated journalist who wasn't even that nice of a guy. People who told their stories and all of them centering around one murderer. That's what the F.B.I. wanted from him, all these people's lives, the parts that he had not put in the book. Those lives would give him the ability to see around corners and they wanted to do that. Jeffrey wanted to write down everything the F.B.I. knew and begin filling up another room like this one.

  That's what he was trading. His knowledge of Matthew Brand for a book, and in doing that, he would shorten the length of time he would have to gather new information. He could, literally, give them four states right now where Brand might be heading, and actually narrow that down to one if he wanted. Then what? Then he sends the cops and every F.B.I. agent in the country down to Florida and this thing ends much, much quicker than he wanted. He needed time; he needed it to stretch out; he needed Brand to get to work. If they caught him in the next week, there would be no book. There would be no other room for more legal pads and recordings.

  "Jeffrey?" Frank asked.

  "I'm here, just a sec."

  All he needed to do was keep his mouth shut. He could give them access to all of this. They could bring four people in here and have everything read in two days and still not really know what it all meant. They hadn't lived it, and it was four people with four separate amounts of information, not all of it combined to one person. They could create a story just like he had but they wouldn't be able to see around the corners. He would be on his vacation and they could call all they wanted, ask him questions about what they found, and he'd answer them. As best he could, obviously, and the best he could do would be to not let them simply track down Brand.

  More than his own selfish reasons though, what sitting here and reading all day had reminded him, was that he might owe Brand more than that. Brand had given him a life that ten books might not have done. An argument could be made that Jeffrey owed Brand a part of all his wealth, and to simply give him up—did Brand deserve better than that?

  "Tell them I'm in," he said.

  "Sounds good. Let me know if you have any more problems with them, okay?"

  "Will do, Frank. Thanks."

  Jeffrey hung up the phone. He would be done in here by tomorrow night. Then he would buy his ticket to Florida. They really didn't even need to read all this stuff to understand what was happening here. Jeffrey had found a tidbit in the boxes that confirmed it, but it wasn't actually necessary. Brand loved to talk back then, to tell the world what he was doing. He felt the cops had flaunted their innocence at trial and he would flaunt his guilt just as much as he could. He met a guy in a bar one night that never went to the police, that had kept quiet until Jeffrey showed up asking his questions. The man was some kind of loon anarchist, didn't believe the police were worth much, and so hadn't volunteered them any information. Or he had been lying, which was why Jeffrey never put what he said in the book.

  Brand used to watch the cops for hours, just like other serial killers. He would get their entire routine down. He memorized every second, every deviation, every similarity. He followed them, oftentimes sitting a few booths over from them, wearing some kind of disguise that he created. Then when they left, he would talk if someone was willing to listen. Most people went to the police, each of them telling a different story, a different piece of what Brand wanted the world to know. Except this man, he had kept his mouth shut and Jeffrey had only found him because he researched where the third cop, Terrel Whitney, used to hang.

  The bar was one of those places where you ate peanuts and threw the shells on the floor, so that when you walked anywhere you could feel the crunch of someone's last meal. Wooden tables and wooden booths and a bar with more graffiti on it than any dilapidated bridge Jeffrey had ever seen. He didn't mind being in the bar—even then, he didn't mind being in any establishment that served up booze, although now he preferred drinking at home.

  Jeffrey began with his questions, his yellow pad right there with him: who knew Terrel Whitney? Anyone see him in here often? Anyone ever say anything strange about Terrel?

  * * *

  "I did."

  For an early Friday afternoon, the bar was still pretty full. A dozen or so people hanging around the pool tables, another half dozen at the bar itself, and a man and woman throwing darts. Jeffrey always started the questions with the bartender but the answers came from a man sitting to Jeffrey's right.

  "Six months ago or so."

  Jeffrey looked at him, trying to judge the man's intoxication and whether there might be danger in talking with him. The man kept his eyes on the small television behind the bar, watching two baseball teams play. A golden beer sat in front of him though his hand dipped into the bowl of peanuts more often than it reached for the drink.

  "Would you mind talking to me about it? What's your name, sir? I'm Jeffrey Dillan." He extended a hand but the man didn't look over from the television.

  "Are you a cop?"

  "No, sir. I'm a journalist."

  The man nodded slightly, seemingly more to himself than Jeffrey.

  "Yeah, we can talk then probably. If I find out you're a cop though, the conversations done. Got it?"
/>   "Yes, sir."

  "I'm Gerard Willis and I suppose we're talking about that Brand case, aren't we?"

  Terrel Whitney was known. His face, his funeral, all of it covering the news just like the other three cops who Brand found. Whitney was dead and anyone that asked questions about him was probably trying to ask questions about Brand.

  "We are," Jeffrey said.

  "I didn't talk to Whitney much and outside of him being a cop, I didn't have no hard feelings towards him. After he killed that black kid, I almost felt bad for him. You never know what blacks are going to do, pull out a lighter or a gun whenever they reach into a pocket. Almost felt bad, except he still killed a kid. You want to talk about him or the man that spoke with me?"

  "Probably both, but the other man first. Do you remember what he looked like?"

  "Like anyone else. I think he had blonde hair and blue eyes. He had a little scar on his chin like he'd fallen as a kid. Nothing abnormal."

  Jeffrey jotted down the description, knowing that Matthew Brand kept his head as bald as Lex Luther's.

  "What did he talk to you about?"

  "He asked if I knew the big guy in the back, and I said 'Terrel? I know of him.' I guess after that he told me a lot of what was going to happen next. I'll be honest with you, the man sounded fucking crazy. I guess he was, huh?"

  "He talked about the murders?"

  "Yeah, I mean, he said Terrel would die soon although he didn't say how. Someone else came on the news a few weeks later saying someone told them how each of these cops were going to die, so I guess I wasn't the only one he talked to. For me though, he didn't get down into the details of exactly what he'd do."

  "You didn't go to the police?" Jeffrey asked.

  "I was legit torn about that. He said he was going to kill Terrel, said he was going to snatch him right away from his family and he promised me that he would never see them again." Gerard turned for the first time from the television and looked at Jeffrey. "Who was I going to tell though? The cops? My elected representative? Terrel himself, who had probably killed more people than his fair share? It wasn't my business and even now, with the man dead, I still don't feel it was my business. You can let yourself be pulled into things or you can sit them out. That guy, if it was Brand, he wanted to pull me into whatever game he was playing but I didn't let him. Now Terrel's dead and I'm here alive talking to you."

  "I'm not judging, Mr. Willis. That's not why I'm here."

  "I wouldn't care if ya did. I wouldn't be talking to you if I cared." He looked back to the baseball game and a song started up on the Jukebox behind them. "He said something else too, and maybe I should still go to the cops about it. Maybe by telling you, I am. You going to run and tell the police about what I'm saying here?"

  "The only way they'll know is if they read what I'm writing, and I certainly won't be sending any free copies to police stations."

  "I guess it doesn't matter. The man's caught and isn't going to be doing too much to anyone else in the near future. A few beers in and he really opened up. I shouldn't have sat there listening to it all, should have told someone to kick him out, but you don't meet someone insane every day and I guess I wanted the experience. He said he would get even with them all, but that it still wasn't justice. That even though they would die, that was very different than watching their children die. He said he wished he could do both. Kill them and show them what it felt like to have their children killed."

  * * *

  Jeffrey talked to the man ten years ago and stashed the notes in this room. He'd kept it out of the book because writing about a cop hating racist wasn't going to lend much credibility to his story. That didn't mean he was lying though and it made sense when you put the pieces of what Brand said together. The story was a weave of tapestry, and when all the parts connected, it would resemble a work of Da Vinci. Complex and beautiful for the person who put it together. Brand had, in his own way, told Gerard Willis about the long game. About what he wanted to do when Stage One ended.

  Stage One never reached completion. He never finished his art. Almost morose, but Jeffrey felt the world had never really seen his greatness because of that.

  Jeffrey didn't know how Brand would understand that he needed to begin in Florida, but Jeffrey didn't know how to bring back the dead either. Brand did. So if he escaped with any kind of plan, he would head to Florida. If there was no plan, Brand would create one quickly. All roads would lead to Florida then.

  Chapter Nine

  The Devil's Dream

  By Jeffrey Dillan

  Chapter 3

  At the age of eighteen, much of the world considered Matthew Brand a waste. He should, by all accounts, have already made significant contributions ranging from a cure for cancer to space colonization. At eighteen, Brand still attended school, working on his fourth PhD—while the rest of society his age would be beginning their undergraduate degree if not heading to the workforce.

  His former professor, Marigold Caris, told me:

  "It was shocking and a bit depressing. I taught him when he was twelve, out of high school for just a couple of years. I haven't seen a mind like his before or since, and even at that young, I knew the boy would change the world. There are always kids that run through high school and college, becoming the next youngest PhD ever, but then they dive so deep into their field that they're never heard outside of it. They may do some pretty big things in whatever area they focus in, but they're not going to make large changes in the way society functions. Matthew was different. He was, for lack of a better term, the Second Coming. You knew after you taught him for a few days that no single area of focus would hold him, that he would take the world and remake it as he saw fit. And then you go on with your life, understanding that, and six years later he's still in the classroom learning from people who have studied their entire life to accumulate the knowledge he held at fourteen. It was depressing watching that."

  He'd graduated high school at ten, not quite the youngest person to ever do it—that honor is held by an Indian woman named Something or Other. Eight years later he was producing little, rarely even the coveted peer reviewed papers that PhDs thrive on. It didn't matter to the schools he applied to, they knew his name, and that his attendance at their university could do a lot. He went to class; he wrote the papers necessary to graduate—all of them being accepted to whichever journal he submitted to, but none of them meaning much.

  I talked to another professor who taught him at his final university, Yale, where Brand was gaining his PhD in advanced mathematics, specifically non-communicative geometry. I sat in Dr. Codie Quinlan's office on a day so cold that my nipples could nearly cut glass. He said this about Matthew Brand:

  "I'm fairly certain he already knew the theorems I was trying to teach the class. He had his computer on and rarely looked up at me as I went through formulas on the white board and with PowerPoint lessons. Sometimes I would call on him, early on, to show him that he needed to listen to me, but he always knew the answer. He barely even looked up from his computer to talk when I did it. You begin to wonder if he's listening or not, but then when he always knows the answer, you begin to wonder why he's there. It wasn't a good thing for other students to see, for sure, but what could I do, kick him out? No one else in the world was collecting PhD’s as quickly as he was, no one else could even attempt it. The kid probably brought in a million dollars a year by himself from donations. I think he already knew everything that I had to teach in that class and I think he was lazy. I never knew what he was doing on that computer, but as far as I know cancer still isn't cured, so he wasn't working on that."

  Laziness. It’s a word that seems ridiculous to speak about in connection with Brand, especially after everything that transpired. Still, most of his professors would use the adjective to describe him. Matthew's laziness didn't affect his grades because he wasn't challenged. The only thing it affected was his production. He withheld his gift from the world, and didn't care.

  Matthew
Brand lived with a woman named Dawn White, a twenty-eight year old PhD candidate studying biology. They shared a three-bedroom condo just a bit off campus and Dawn was quite open when it came to discussing her old roommate. She's now sixty-two and about to retire from her position as full professor at the University of Georgia.

  "Matthew didn't care about any of it. That's easy to say and it's easy to write down in your book, but if you haven't been through a PhD program you can't really understand what that means. They are all encompassing, years of one hundred hour weeks. You truly have to fall into your work and hope you don't drown. Not for Matthew. He did no work outside of class. I asked him once when he wrote his papers, he told me he wrote them during class. I just kind of looked at him like he was insane and then he laughed. He said something like, 'Sorry, I'd give it to you if I could.' I thought about his offer a lot later, at least while we lived together. Whether or not he would give me that gift if he could and whether or not I would take it. The answer I think is clear now, no on both accounts. Someone like him can't care, because if he begins to, I'm not sure there's anything that can stop him."

  Eight years of our man's life were spent in college classrooms with everyone he met simultaneously amazed at his incandescent brilliance and startled by his stunted work ethic. How many more years and how many more degrees would he have piled up if not for Jerome Watson? The world owes Watson a great debt and perhaps a prison sentence. It can be assumed everything that came after Jerome Watson, both the ten years of miraculous discoveries until Hilman's murder and the ten years of Frankenstein-like science after, couldn’t have happened without him.

  The class was Complex Function Theory, which I tried to understand and couldn't. It contained a total of ten people including the professor, Dr. Watson. A black man nearing fifty, he had heard about Brand and what to expect in class. Virtually no participation and yet an effortless A. Dr. Watson didn't like the idea of that.

  "I was, honestly, just appalled admissions let someone like that into Yale University. It's like you think this place is prestigious, is supposed to have some real merit behind it, and here is this lazy, brilliant kid making a mockery of what we were trying to do. We're all smart but what separates us from other universities is our ability to work hard for long periods of time. Then this student comes in and keeps his head down because he's too busy looking at Facebook or some other nonsense, and yet is able to basically tell us how to do our jobs. That wasn't going to work for me."