I kicked over the box of toys, the one beneath it tipping to spill more of the same. Then I whirled around the corner, expecting to see him still back at the scythe in the adjacent corridor.
A fist was in my face before I even registered what it was. I staggered backwards, pain blinding me from the hard knock to my forehead. I was just getting my balance back when a sheet came flying at me.
It was stained and reeking of waste. Lost under it, I dropped to the ground in case he was readying to throw a second punch. Spinning awkwardly to the side, the sheet caught on something and was dragged partly off me. I was forced to drop the gun and catch hold of the fabric to jerk it off my face.
He was gone.
So was the scythe.
Then I heard a sound right behind me.
He was coming out from another curtain only a few feet away, dressed in Grim Reaper garb from head to toe. Some kind of noisemaker hidden on his person began to play on a loop, giggling incessantly. Hee-hee-hee. Hee-hee-hee. Hee-hee-hee. As I whirled to face him, he swung the long arm of the scythe.
I did what any reasonable person would not want to do. In the half a second I had to make a decision, I realized that standing where I was would lose me my head. Back up and the blade would still slash my throat. So I jumped into him as the scythe made a deadly whicker through the air.
Then I drew up my knee with all the force I could muster and nailed him in the groin.
It was not the first time in life I had had to do that. But his high-pitched scream was on a level beyond normal agony, the pain my knee caused him so extreme that the scythe fell from his suddenly boneless fingers. It whirled away and landed in the dirt. I shoved him away from me violently as he shrieked like I’d thrown him into the very fires of hell.
Hee-hee-hee. Hee-hee-hee. Hee-hee-hee.
He fell backwards in a fetal position, knocking into the outside wall of his maze. A partition held steady at the blow, but a heavy wooden door did not. Collapsing on top of him, he howled again when it landed on his torso. His mask had fallen off, and the giggling came to an abrupt stop.
The top of my knee throbbed. There had been something metal under his costume, and I’d driven that without mercy into his tender parts. Quickstepping to the sheet, I swept it from the ground and snatched up my gun. Sirens blasted on the other side of the house.
His face bloodless, Macdonald thrashed around to get the door off his body. “Put your hands up where I can see them!” I shouted, advancing on him with the gun extended.
The door moved again as he worked his left hand up into view.
“Now the other one!” I ordered.
He flopped about like a fish, his arm possibly trapped in his stupid costume. Then a leering though pained smile spread over his lips, and there was a blast.
Gun. He had a gun under there. He’d taken a shot at me right through the door.
I fired into it before he could take another shot. Once, twice, thrice, each blast shattered the air anew.
His smile became a grimace; his head tilted back to the earth. Back at the house, the door flew open and uniforms thundered down the plank, guns drawn and Halloran among them. Only then did I see that I was bleeding. Macdonald’s bullet had passed along my thigh, ripping my pants and drawing blood. It wasn’t a serious wound, just stinging.
“He’s down!” I called. Calls traveled back for EMTs.
They had to try to save him. I knew it was procedure, but it goaded me to think of him receiving care. Then bodies flashed past me and the fallen door was pulled away.
I felt better immediately. The relief was so primal and vicious, so overwhelming that I smiled. I’d gotten him once in the upper left torso, once through the stomach, and once through the base of his neck. Blood was spilling through the hole in his throat, dampening the costume and slipping down to the earth to puddle there.
Head shot aside, I couldn’t have done better if I’d tried. There was no saving the life of this shitty meat sack. His soul was already winging away. The shell he left behind just needed to be scraped up and deposited in a body bag.
“He’s down,” I repeated to Halloran, who was standing beside me.
“I see it, Blue,” Halloran said quietly. “You got him.”
Hee-hee-hee.
Everyone jumped and looked in alarm to the body. Macdonald stared glassily to the sky. All that moved upon him was the blood pumping from his neck, and the stains growing wider on his chest and stomach.
I saw what the laughter was coming from, a very small cassette player with a tiny tape inside. In his fall, it must have slipped out of his clothing.
Hee-hee-
I stomped on it.
Epilogue
“It must feel good,” Tyler said.
It was a perfect autumn evening, the summer heat gone but the winter chill yet to start. A blanket of fog was rolling in over the western hills. We were sitting on opposing loveseats on the raised deck in the Cavil backyard, Brendan stationed below at the grill. Two kittens rolled past our feet, wrestling with one another in a clumsy, fuzzy battle of cuteness. They were somewhere between four to six weeks old, to my cat-ignorant estimate, one a yellowish color and the other as orange as a pumpkin with faint tabby markings. Named Lion and Tiger, they rarely stopped moving. The third kitten was on my shoulder, purring with gusto beneath my ear as she dozed. She was the runt of the litter, solid brown and with velvet-soft fur. Her name was Bear, and her main goal in life was to find someone to snuggle with while her brother and sister kicked the shit out of each other.
“Having the case over, you mean?” I asked Tyler.
He nodded. “You won. He’s gone. He won’t ever hurt anyone again.”
“It doesn’t feel like winning,” I said. Seeing that my answer intrigued him, I tried to elaborate. “It’s not like coming in first in a game, a clean win. It’s never clean in my line of work.”
His dark eyes were keen with concentration. “Because you can’t make it better for the people he killed. They’re still gone. Is that what you’re saying?” he asked.
“I can’t bring them back,” I said. “All I can do is hunt down the person who killed them. And I can’t do anything for the people they left behind. They have justice for the loved one they lost, but they’d so much rather have their loved one back.”
“I read that whole article in the paper about them, Chloe Rogers and Francisco Hernandez. It could have been anyone.”
For once, the Darby Star had done the right thing. Instead of dedicating the front page to a torture porn dissection of the late John Elliot Macdonald’s warped mind, they had given it over to the two victims. I’d read it too, and both stories were equally painful for very different reasons. Chloe Rogers had been so shy and isolated, except for a friendship with a roommate, and her difficulties in navigating young adult life without family support struck a chord with the community. Her funeral had been packed with flowers and strangers, so that she did not pass into the night wholly unnoticed. Francisco Hernandez’s story was just as poignant, a man full of dreams he was about to realize before he was cut down. His son would only know him from pictures and stories; his wife now had to struggle on alone. All Francisco had done was leave the house for work; all Chloe had done was attend a party.
Like Tyler said, it could have been anyone.
“Do you like your meat medium or medium-rare or black as a hockey puck?” Brendan called up to the deck. He had a sweet set-up in his backyard, a fancy grill and a long serving counter with stools tucked underneath. Festive lights in green, blue, and red hung along the counter and a water fountain pattered soothingly nearby.
“Medium,” I said with a smile. Tomorrow Brendan would be driving Tyler over to his mother’s house for a visit, and Brendan had asked me out to a dinner just for adults in the evening.
A date. I couldn’t wait. I needed to hit my closet for something nice to wear. There were dresses in the back I hadn’t seen in years.
Lion and Tiger broke apart
and scampered off in opposite directions to explore. The deck was fenced in so they couldn’t escape to the yard, and they weren’t big enough yet to leap it. Tiger sniffed my feet and Lion tipped over while swatting at a bug flying past. Then they caught sight of one another again. One fanny wriggled and another fanny wriggled, and they pounced on each other.
“They were lucky you found them,” I said to Brendan.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Brendan said, shaking his head. “I know that’s the sort of thing that happens all the time, sadly, but I still couldn’t grasp what I was looking at. I just kept hearing a tiny mewing as I went to my car and I thought some stray mama cat was moving her kittens from place to place. Feral cats hang around the restaurants across the street. But I followed the sound to the dumpster and there they were in a little box on top of the garbage. It didn’t look like they’d been there too long.”
“And with the humane society like five blocks away from the yoga studio!” Tyler said with indignation. “All you have to do is drop animals off there if you don’t want them. At least someone will take care of them then. They just got thrown into the trash to die.”
“Which ones are you keeping?” I asked as Bear woke up bleary-eyed with an adorable yawn.
“Lion and Tiger,” Tyler said. “They’re best buddies so we can’t break them up. Mom was thinking about taking Bear, but now she isn’t so sure that’s a good idea. She’s got some new business trips added to her schedule and she doesn’t want to board Bear in a kennel all the time. Bear is usually stuck to us like glue.”
As she had been stuck to me for the last thirty minutes, I said, “I can see that.”
“She follows Dad and me around everywhere to see what we’re doing. Mom has a lot of late nights and she’s afraid Bear would be too lonely without her.”
Bear wriggled and I set her down. Bounding over to her siblings, she hurled herself gleefully into the tussling pile. In a minute she bounded back to me and put her front paws on my leg with a plaintive expression. I picked her up and put her in my lap, where she settled into a tiny ball to watch Lion and Tiger battle. I ran my finger along her soft head and she rumbled with an approving purr. The vibrations trembled her whole body. She was such a tiny thing, but she was as loud as a motorcycle.
“Would you want to take her if Mom doesn’t?” Tyler asked. “She’s really friendly. And she’s little but the vet said she’s healthy. If you’re going to be late on a case sometime, I can come over and feed her. We only live a mile apart. Have you ever had a cat? They aren’t hard like dogs can be. They just need-”
“Give her a chance to come up with an answer, Tyler,” Brendan said.
“No, I’ve never had a cat,” I said. “Or anything, for that matter. I moved around so much as a kid that I couldn’t have pets. But I always wanted a cat.”
“Why did you move around so much?” Tyler asked immediately.
“Ever hear the proverb that the grass is greener?”
“Yeah, the grass is always greener over the fence. It means someone who always thinks it’s better somewhere else even though it’s just fine where they are.”
“Exactly. That’s my mother in a nutshell. It’s always better somewhere else. Right now she’s in Hawaii since the grass looked greener there, and in a year she’ll be in Washington or Minnesota or Louisiana or Alaska thinking no, no, the grass was greener there all along. A year or so after that, she’ll be somewhere else entirely.”
Tyler’s brow crinkled. “And she doesn’t catch on?”
“No. She’s been doing this for well over forty years. I don’t think she’s capable of catching on, or she would have already.”
Bear’s head went back and forth as Lion and Tiger rolled away from one another and then darted over to Tyler to attack his flip-flops. He yelped, since his feet were still in them. Drawing up his legs, he abandoned his sandals to be mauled. “Bear won’t do that to you,” he assured me. “She likes to sleep in shoes, but she doesn’t chew on them like these two.”
“Would you want to live with me?” I asked Bear. “Fair warning, cat, I am far from an exciting person. When I’m not at work, I lay on the couch a lot and watch TV.”
“She’ll love that,” Brendan snorted, taking the steaks off the grill to rest on a plate. “She’s the laziest kitten on this planet. Sometimes I tuck her in my shirt pocket as I clean around the house, and she just rides along in there. The other two would be climbing out with their needle claws in less than five seconds.” Tyler held out his cell phone with a picture of his father on the screen, Bear’s fuzzy brown head sticking out of his pocket.
“Maybe she has a malfunctioning thyroid like I do,” I said. “We’d be a perfect pair.”
“Can I ask one more question about the case?” Tyler asked.
Brendan looked up from the grill. One eyebrow was raised at the back of his son’s head, and he glanced at me to make sure the questions were okay.
I nodded to Tyler. “Go ahead.”
“What I don’t get is why. Why did that guy do it? Why would anyone do that? He killed two people, and maybe his mom, too. They found dozens of animals buried in his yard, people’s pets that he’d killed. Why? Why mazes? Why any of it?”
“I think everyone wants to know why,” I replied. “That’s one of the great unanswerable questions about minds like his.”
“It sounded like he was abused a lot when he was a kid.”
“He did grow up in an abusive home, but lots of people survive abuse and neglect and they don’t turn into killers. He was clearly suffering from a variety of mental illnesses, but plenty of other people do as well and never do what he did. Part of the answer could be in his DNA, that his psychopathic traits were genetically determined. Yet not all psychopaths kill. So why did he?” I asked. “We don’t know.”
“Did he know it was wrong?”
“The people I’ve met like him . . . they know what they’re doing is wrong, but they don’t care. Their victims aren’t real people in their own right; it’s all about the killer’s ego and fantasies. I believe John Macdonald thought he was better than all of us. Smarter. Worthier. God-like. We were just rats to him. And that made him feel entitled to do whatever he wanted to us, including kill.”
My leg was healed and the lump on my forehead gone. As required after a shooting incident, I’d been put on paid administrative leave temporarily while an investigation was conducted. It hadn’t taken long for both the Internal Affairs Unit and the local prosecutor’s office to decide my actions were justified. Now I was back on duty, and with Halloran had spoken to several people who’d known John Macdonald in his life.
He had been even more invisible than Chloe Rogers. There was so much we would never know about him. He was the neighbor’s kid that never came out to play; the boy in the classroom that made no friends and vanished after a month or two. Former schoolmates had vague memories of him sitting on a wall at recess and watching everyone else have fun with a sneer on his lips. Rarely did he speak or interact with anyone in any way.
But little, nasty acts seemed to happen whenever he was around. He was the kid who’d take the opportunity of a crowd to pinch someone, but by the time his victim spun around, little Johnny Macdonald was already slipping away. Once a boy came in after the winter holidays showing off a model car he had made with his father, and it was found smashed to bits after P.E. Johnny was a sly aggressor even in second grade, but everyone knew he was the only one to have taken a restroom break in that time.
A fourth grade teacher remembered catching him in the act of stealing from a lunchbox, which he vehemently denied with a pilfered sandwich visible in his hand. Ridiculously, he accused her of putting it there. After that, food and money continued to vanish from desks and backpacks and cubbies and coat pockets. Young Johnny was the prime suspect, but he did it so covertly that she only rarely caught him at it. She also remembered how he would change his grades. If she gave him an A- on an assignment, he changed it to an A+ defiantly
. Anything less than perfect would not do, and he could bear no criticism.
She had never taught such a strange, unlikable, and unreachable child. He seemed to hate everyone and everything around him. Desiring no friends, finding joy in taking away the joy of others, he poked the beloved classroom rabbit with a pencil and smeared dog shit on the Valentine’s Day cards he delivered to his peers. His mother occasionally showed up in the middle of the day, ranting and raving about nonsense as she took him out of class, and then in March she pulled him out of the school entirely. Though worried for Johnny, the teacher was relieved to see him go.
There was no record with Child Services; nobody had ever called to report his family. But he did not come to school bruised or bloody, just unkempt and sullen. So he had slipped through the cracks in his sporadic schooling.
In his late adolescence, he attended a few semesters at a nearby junior college and spooked his teachers with his unblinking stare. Most of his classes were science-related, two were psychology, and the coursework proved to be over his head. The only time he spoke was to argue about questions he missed on homework and exams, convinced he was right even when shown incontrovertible evidence that he was wrong. A former biology teacher described him as impossible to instruct since he already knew the answers to everything. He was so far behind that he thought he was in front. Macdonald saw nothing wrong in arguing all through a lecture period and attending office hours to continue with more of the same. Though his tone was tight with fury, his face was as emotionless as a wall.
It sounded like his narcissism had come to an ugly head by this point. I couldn’t figure out why he had bothered to go to college at all. Thwarted by one teacher after another refusing to recognize his genius, the school staff suspected he was behind the hundreds of hang-up calls they received all semester. He had argued at the start of each term with the poor souls in administration too, since they would not promote him to the math class of his choice without him taking and passing the placement exam first. Since he refused to take the test or start in general math, finding the very suggestion an insult to his intelligence, he ended up taking no math classes at all in his short time there.
Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery Page 18
