Unkillable

by Dean C. Moore

  “Guess that’s a win, that he’s not trying to kill us all,” Dion said, giving more than she usually gave to her end of the conversation. “Maybe you should hand this case off to someone else then. He’s not nearly dangerous enough to warrant your attention.”

  “I thought about that.”

  “And…?”

  “That’s why I’m here. There’s something I’m not getting. Something that tells me if I do that, he will punish me with some mass slaughter, so I have to take the case.”

  When he refused to fill the dead air himself, she prompted. “So you think this case is really more about you? That the killer has a thing for you?”

  “Like that helps. They all do. My fan club is bigger than Justin Bieber’s.”

  “You want to do a hypno-regression, to see if we can get at it?”

  “No, I want you to do that Sharon Stone thing, the one where you flash your legs at me, minus your panties.”

  She smiled a strained, emotions-in-check smile, an “I’m too professional to be so easily goaded” smile. “It’s good you haven’t lost your propensity for dreaming, or your sense of humor. Maybe you could save yourself the price of a shrink and just get a mirror to talk to. And a cat. With a good sense of humor, a powerhouse imagination, and a cat, it’s easy enough to fill in the rest of the blanks.”

  “I’m not a cat person. And my reflection is too hypnotic, keeps me from thinking anything but ‘I love you terribly’.”

  She smiled plastically to show off how much she could corral her impatience. “You’re not going to escape into black humor, are you? You have your adoring fans at the office who will all laugh appreciably at your bad jokes.”

  The dust out of David’s hair, Adrian decided to leave the bust alone and retired to the sofa again. This time he sat, crossed his legs, and bounced the top leg off the bottom one. “I much prefer it when it’s you doing this, by the way, giving me plenty of leg action.”

  “You can borrow my stockings if you like.”

  “I thought we were done with the black humor thing.”

  “My bad. Continue.”

  When he just stared blankly at her carpet she prodded. “Just let your thoughts run free, Adrian. You don’t have to be brilliant when you’re around me. You can afford to let mediocre thoughts take hold. Maybe, let the performance anxiety go, and who knows, you might find sometimes it’s the dumb ass in back of the class that says the darnedest things.”

  He was quiet a while longer, but then the dam showed some cracks.

  “He’s going the wrong way, this guy,” Adrian said in a whiny tone conveying exasperation. “He’s supposed to be escalating, not de-escalating. How does a pederast who abused a handful of kids rank higher than someone who was oppressing people by the billions? I mean, if the first guy, Brent Thomas, pulled off what he intended, we’d all be paying the price.”

  “So, how is it worse, Adrian?”

  Adrian sucked in his breath as if he were about to jump out of a moving plane at altitude, before blasting it out as if he were stoking a fire with a bellows. “I guess we’re bombarded with disturbing statistics day and night until we get numb to them. Maybe a handful of child abuse cases do resonate better with more people.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “’Cause I’m not. But then it’s humanity I love, people I hate.”

  She didn’t even bother with a faint smile. It was too easy to deflect and deflate with humor for him. With a lot of these guys in his line of work, it was laugh or cry.

  “Maybe I should start with what I do know,” Adrian said, still talking to some imaginary point a few feet from him between his eyes and the floor. “He has a thing for erecting golems, for tearing real people apart and erecting hollow shells, then animating them.

  “Perhaps the killer thinks of his victims as self-golomizing. They took what was sacred, God’s creation, and turned themselves into hollowed out automatons piloted by the one holding the charm, their overlords, whatever bosses had the leverage on them to make them do whatever they wanted.”

  Adrian scratched the back of his neck as he continued to talk it out. “The golem is a figure from Jewish mysticism, which, at least according to the medieval Spanish cabala, is less concerned with ecstatic experience than with esoteric knowledge. The old mystics and current-day high priests want to know about the nature of the divine world and its hidden connections with the world of creation.”

  Dion made a mental note that Adrian was using his encyclopedic memory to retreat from the world again, as a shield, another defense mechanism. It was one of several tools in his toolbox, right next to the gallows humor he liked to pull out when he needed to tool away on a case undistracted. It served well to put up a wall between him and his memories as well, though just as often, it was the source of those worries. Knowing too much.

  “So what hidden connection to the divine world do our killer’s golems offer?” Adrian asked himself, taking full advantage of the safe space to commune with thoughts he would otherwise not reach for fear that they weren’t part of his best thinking, which is what he owed the world. In Dion’s company, he could allow himself a certain sloppiness of mind he could never otherwise permit. She suspected it was because he knew that in her company, there was no such thing as meaningless chatter.

  The urge to always perform at his best was why he surrounded himself with the best of the best, so that by standing on the shoulders of giants… in his case, it’d be that much easier to keep from falling off the pedestal people put him on. But for his own sake he needed to fall from time to time. And so he was seated here in her office.

  Dion considered the possibility that Adrian’s increasing mental breakdowns regarding the one perp that would get by him and, by so doing, end their world, really had less to do with the odds of forestalling a genocidal future and more with his own insecurities. Better the world be too unsavable at this point than admit that he couldn’t do his job to everyone’s and most of all, his satisfaction. No doubt, knowing Adrian, he’d come to just the opposite conclusion.

  “If the golem is the link between the divine and earthly realms, at least in this guy’s playbook, then…” He’d no doubt said the phrase out loud in hopes that the rest of the sentence would just fill itself in in the resulting vacuum. So far it had not.

  “Has our killer taken over for an absentee god? Seeing himself in the role of the divine, and intervening to save the souls of these fallen angels?” Adrian finally said. “Does he see them as fallen angels? Were they doing God’s work at one time, at least according to our ‘savior’? Is he giving them a second chance by ensuring there’s no denying their divinity from inside of an unkillable body?

  “Are these his missionaries, his disciples he’s getting ready to send out into the world? As soon as he can perfect his immortality formula?” Adrian groaned and ran his hand over the top of his head to invite more circulation to his brain. “Too many clever theories by a clever man signifying nothing.”

  He made eye contact with her again, sort of. His eyes were aimed at her, but they were still focused elsewhere. “That’s why we had to evolve beyond sheer logic, you know? No way to tell one brilliant theory from another without the scientific method. And what are my scientists telling me? That there is no such thing as an unkillable man, and no tech yet capable of producing him.”

  “Just keep talking, Adrian. You’ll get where you’re going. You always do. Your cleverness is insufferable at times, I know, even to you.”

  He chuckled, got off the couch and went to the window. Rotated his hat in his hand, an old fedora that belonged in a Bogart movie, just like him. He’d have found Klepsky in that Bogart movie too, sure as day. Only difference between them was Adrian missed the past and simpler times, even if he could accommodate better than the rest of them to the future. Klepsky, on the other hand, just didn’t know how to change. He was stuck in whatever era would have accommodated a more rigid psychology, even if that era wasn’t the on
e he was born to. They both had hearts of gold that didn’t suit either of them. Dion reined in her mind; she was going over territory already covered; there was nothing new to be found here. And she was a seeker of novelty in the way that Adrian was; it was their common link. Though what they chose to do with that novelty was entirely different.

  The chaos out the window embodied in the passing traffic, the eruptions of car horns and sirens and shouting, road-raged motorists, which couldn’t be predicted, seemed to draw him back into spinning his web about his killer, determined to control the outcome of this investigation even if he couldn’t control anything else.

  “I’m given to these leaps of imagination, you know,” Adrian said, talking out the window, “far too right-brained for a detective, far too artsy. I get credited for being the best in my field, but the truth is, I get the cases that are suited to me, the ones nobody else can deal with. The truth is, if it weren’t for these brilliant, artsy psycho-killers I’d be lousy at my job. I’d have no way of getting inside the heads of my murderers. Probably couldn’t catch a treed cat.”

  “Stop running yourself down, Adrian. You’re just trying to give yourself an excuse, an out. Better you did this to yourself than your killer created a puzzle you couldn’t solve. Better you psychically flogged yourself until you just couldn’t think straight.” And now she was betraying her earlier conclusions about what was really motivating his failure. If so, she was just following the snaking twists of his mind.

  He grunted. “Aren’t you tired of me by now? You novelty-seeker you? I’m just a broken record and you know already the grooves I tend to get stuck in, all of them, by heart.”

  “We’re all creatures of habit, Adrian. The only difference is you’re so much more in the way other men aren’t.”

  “Not only are you cutting into my session with opinions of your own, you’re resorting to flattery. I assume my time is over and it’s time to fuck one another’s brains out?”

  She checked her watch. “And so it is.”

  She stood and grabbed her trench coat. He couldn’t quite peel himself away from the window, hoping to force more order on his investigation in contrast to the chaos beyond the window, continuing to insist that opposites attract. “Relax, Adrian, you already know what’s nagging at your unconscious. You just refuse to face it until your nemesis forces you to face it.”

  “You know what it is he’s trying to get me to see too, don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why is my job so much easier for you than it is for me?”

  “Because no one’s better at pushing your buttons than I am, darling.”

  He smiled to convey his “no contest there” response, and followed her out the door. “Don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what it is I can’t see for myself?”

  “And spoil the killer’s fun? Techa only knows what world-ending repercussions that might have. Never come between an obsessive and the thing he’s obsessed with, Adrian, unless you plan on being there to arrest him.”

  “Not you too with this ‘Techa’ nonsense. I get enough of that with Celine.”

  “It’s a new goddess for a new world, one increasingly ruled by technology, her domain. You aren’t the only one looking for an escape from the hi-tech age anymore. Just that some prefer a goddess more likely to intervene on their behalf.”

  They were headed down the hall towards the sun blazing through the glass door. Right now he was more concerned with the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel than the actual light. “So, I guess that’s a ‘no’ to the drugs you promised me as well.” She wouldn’t want their killer to think anything was coming between the two of them. Dion didn’t answer. But then that was the nature of rhetorical questions.

  TEN

  Klepsky pressed one on his cell to dial Gorman. “Yes, sir,” Ed’s voice said coming in ahead of the dial tone actually connecting at the other end. “You do realize you don’t need the phone, right, sir? I haunt you like a ghost. I’m everywhere you are. I never leave your side. A lap dog couldn’t hope to be this loyal. Though truly, it’s I who is haunted when not physically proximate to you.”

  Klepsky chuckled silently to himself as he shook his head. Ed’s alter egos sounded like they were blurring for the time being. “David Clancy is going to be joining the team.”

  “Yes, sir, I heard. Not sure how I feel about that, especially with the very distinct possibility that he’s even brighter than I am.”

  “Relax, Ed, something tells me he’s not going to be filling the same niche in my life that you fill anytime soon.”

  He could feel Ed brighten up at the other end of the line even before he spoke. “Well, in that case, sir, happy to have him aboard.”

  “He needs a sense of family, so try and bond with the kid.”

  “I’m an overgrown kid myself, sir. I’m sure we’ll be besties inside of an hour.”

  “Good.” Klepsky reflected fondly, if briefly, on the days when the thought of a twenty-eight-year-old man-boy would have struck him as strange.

  “I gather you want to be briefed on your next suspect.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind.” Klepsky was grateful Ed was slipping back into all-business mode, which meant he wouldn’t be wasting any more of his time, being as the morning had gotten off to a slow start.

  “Cray Willis, sir, that’s the name of suspect number two. I’ve plotted his coordinates into your GPS. And no worries, sir, something tells me you won’t be bringing this one back to the office except in handcuffs. He’s a resident of Bellevue.”

  “That place still open?”

  “Yeah, and if you’re thinking Arkham Asylum from Batman, you’re pretty much on the money. The wing he’s on is reserved for the psyhoest of the psychos. Murdered his first victim at the age of three.”

  “Precocious little fucker. Child prodigies must be the theme for today. Don’t mind me, Ed, carry on.”

  “At three it was because his mother was late with his favorite flavor of Gerber’s baby food. Chocolate, in case you’re wondering. That or she just stopped feeding him it, weaning him off of soft foods. The story changes a little every time he tells it. At five, it was because the babysitter wouldn’t fondle him, which begs the question, what exactly went on during those first five years? At seven it was because it was the anniversary of murders one and two, both of which occurred on the twenty-seventh of the month, and he wanted to commemorate the occasion. So he murdered twenty-seven people, all on the same day, all without leaving the safety of his home or having any guests over. As it turned out, he’d trained his dog to kill for him. The dog continued to kill twenty-seven a day until the detective finally trailed the murders back to the mutt. The said mutt was put down, and one year after, to the day, the detective turned up dead. No one thought it was by accident. Though no one could explain how he wasn’t killed by natural causes either.

  “I could go on, but I think you get the idea. He’s mastered the craft of murdering in plain sight from under everyone’s noses without anyone being any the wiser. And he’s been on every agency’s top ten list since the age of seven, and no one has gotten any closer to apprehending him, at least for murder.”

  “So what’s he doing in Arkham, I mean Bellevue?”

  “He likes it there, signed himself in. Apparently he likes fucking with the doctors. He’s probably managed to turn them into killers in the time he’s been there. Might explain how he’s been able to describe every murder he says he’s done since being in the asylum in gory detail. But no one has been able to track his killings back to his doctors or his nurses or the other patients either. Theory number two is that he’s found a way to come and go from the institution as he pleases to commit his crimes and just checks back in and waits for the cops to come around so he can frustrate the hell out of them as kind of the icing on the cake.”

  “And his tie-in with our hi-tech killings?” Klepsky was secretly hoping there was none, but he knew better, at least he knew Ed better. Th
e last thing Klepsky needed was another mastermind on the other side of the table, but better that than this guy. Cray Willis gave him the creeps and they hadn’t even met yet, which was saying a lot as it was hard to be more creeped out than by their current serial killer who favored the supernatural as a motif, from flocks of ravens at his beckon call to reanimating dead bodies.

  “The hi-tech tie in, sir, is he’s a hypnotist. The best anyone’s ever seen. There are cameras on him twenty-four-seven from multiple angles to minimize any chance of his hypnotizing anybody. But no one is entirely confident they’re doing a damn bit of good. It’s translated into excellent job security for the staff though, being as no one wants to hire them now, and if they have been turned into murderers, they’re exactly where they should be, under constant surveillance. The hospital’s oversight committee even has ASIs dedicated to around-the-clock analysis, looking into any way Cray Willis could be pulling off his mesmerism.”

  Klepsky, having been briefed on them earlier, knew ASIs referred to Advanced Singular Intelligences, programmed to diligently carry out a specific function as if the rest of the world didn’t exist, only that problem. The Google search engine was a prime example. “Maybe I should do this interview by phone, from another county.”

  “If it’s true what they say about him, sir, it wouldn’t matter. No worries, I have your back. I’ve already injected him with a lethal toxin. He’ll only continue to live if he plays nice, as the antidote must be administered daily. So nothing is going to happen to you or anyone on our team anytime soon.”

  “But if he can bring someone back from the dead…”

  “That’s the thing, sir. I don’t think it’s him that’s bringing people back from the dead. I think it’s the army of PhD research doctors he’s mobilized to do it for him, all while under hypnosis, mind you. And if this guy’s on a crusade, he’s not going to take the time to slow his racing for the first unkillable man prototype by pulling any of his doctors off mission just to find an antidote for my little poison.”