by Lis Wiehl
Tommy looked at his father, surprised to get such a lucid answer.
“Thanks, Papa,” he said.
But his father was gone again, lost in the light of the cathode tube in front of him.
Tommy ended the night with a half-hour sweat in the sauna and was getting ready for bed when his phone rang. He wondered who could be calling so late at night. He hoped it was Dani. Instead, he heard Detective Casey’s voice.
“Tommy, Phil Casey. Listen,” the detective said, “I just wanted to give you a heads-up. We sent a car over to the school. They said they don’t have Amos and don’t know where he went. My guess is he’s a thousand miles away by now, but you never know. I’m sending a squad car over to Dani’s house, just to sit in the drive. No big deal, just be aware. Amos is loose.”
Tommy immediately called Lucius Mills and apologized because he’d given Lucius the night off. Given the short notice, he told Lucius he’d pay him double if he could come back and sit with Arnie.
“Bring the girls,” Tommy added.
He hung up and went to his dresser. He found his Boy Scout knife, for luck, and his .45 Taurus 1911SS automatic, just in case his luck ran out.
Faith is good, he thought, but faith and a gun is better.
He went to his closet, stripped down to his T-shirt, tucked the gold cross necklace his father had given him as a confirmation present inside the shirt, donned his own military-grade Kevlar vest, and threw a sweatshirt over it.
Faith and a gun is better, but faith and a gun and a Kevlar vest is best, he thought.
If all went well, Dani would never know that Tommy had come to her house to watch over her. Perhaps it was unnecessary. He hoped it was, but that didn’t mean he had a choice.
He reheated a cup of that morning’s coffee in the microwave while he waited for Lucius, who lived ten minutes away. While he watched out the window for headlights at the gate, he had just enough time to log onto his laptop, click to his favorite tech-gear website, and order a handheld infrared thermal imaging camera, though it was obviously too late to be of any use tonight.
When his security system notified him that Lucius had keyed in the entry code at the gate, Tommy ran for his Harley and told Lucius, in the courtyard, that he wasn’t sure when he’d be back.
38.
Across town, Dani needed a night to unplug. She shut off her BlackBerry, disconnected her landline, took a bath, found her favorite sweatpants and cozy red hooded sweatshirt, and curled up in the den with a pile of magazines.
It was a good night to light the first fire of the season. The woodbox had been empty all summer so she went to the side porch where she kept her firewood, half a cord left from the previous winter’s last delivery. She filled her arms with wood and carried the load into the den, dropping it on the bricks of the outer hearth. She moved the fire screen aside and built a fire, adding kindling first and then larger logs stacked crisscrossed to the back wall of the firebox. She checked to make sure the flue was open, then struck a wooden kitchen match and was about to light the newspapers she’d crumpled beneath the andirons when she sensed the presence of somebody else in the room.
She turned to see Amos standing behind her.
When she looked to grab the poker, it was missing from the rack of fire irons.
“Are you looking for this?” he asked her, holding the poker in his left hand. In his right he held a large meat cleaver with Chinese characters on the handle.
She blew out the match.
“Vy gorazdo krasivyee, chem moya mat.’ Moi otets mog by zarabotat’ mnogo deneg, prodavaya vas na ulitsah Moskvy,” Amos said.
“I don’t speak Russian,” Dani said, her heart pounding.
“I said you’re pretty,” Amos said. “My father would have liked you.”
“What are you doing here?”
She reminded herself that above all else, she needed to stay calm.
What were her options?
Think, Dani, think.
Amos was a healthy young man of above average size, not athletic, according to what she’d learned about him, but no doubt faster than she was and probably stronger. She gauged the distance to the closest door. She looked for anything she could use to defend herself.
Widen your focus, Dani. You have more than those two options.
“What are we doing here, don’t you mean?” he said. “Why has destiny brought us together?”
Where was the safest place? There were no weapons in the house. Her father’s golf clubs were in the basement, along with all his tools. Hammers. Screwdrivers. Saws. What else could she use? The basement was too far away.
Where was the safest place?
The kitchen is the safest place.
“I don’t know,” Dani said. “We’re free to choose our own destinies, aren’t we?”
Take deep, slow breaths.
Calm your mind.
“Are we?” Amos said. “You can’t stop what’s going to happen, can you? None of us can. That’s why they call it destiny.”
She saw his knuckles whiten where he gripped the poker.
The kitchen is the safest place.
There are knives there.
Cayenne pepper in the cupboard.
A can of oven cleaner under the sink, and ammonia, and bleach—chemicals she could throw in his eyes …
Widen your focus.
“I was about to put water on for tea,” she said.
“You were about to build a fire in the fireplace,” Amos said.
“You’re right,” she said. “But after that, I was going to make tea. Would you like some?”
He was blocking her way to the kitchen. She didn’t dare move any closer to him. Closing the distance might prompt him to act. She needed to get to the kitchen.
“If you don’t want tea, do you mind if I make myself a cup?”
He smiled. “By all means,” he said, moving aside.
39.
As Tommy waited for the gate to open, he noticed that he’d forgotten to take his mail in. Something struck him all at once.
The mail.
Snail mail.
The PDF Dani had sent him had been a scan of the letter Amos had sent her.
A scan of a paper letter, not an e-mail, printed on St. Adrian’s Academy stationery, mailed to her house, her home address, even though Dani had told Tommy she’d removed her home number and address from the available databases.
Somehow, Amos knew where Dani lived.
He throttled up, his rear tire fishtailing and kicking back gravel as he sped away. The blacktop flew beneath his wheels and the deep growl of the Harley’s engine revved to a shrill scream as he rapidly closed the distance between his house and Dani’s, a single line looping in his head: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow …
40.
In the kitchen Dani filled a cast iron teakettle with hot water. It was something she could use to defend herself, but if she knew it, Amos knew it too. She put the water on the stove and turned the dial to ignite the gas. The fire was another weapon. She tried to think if she had any cleaning products under the sink she could use in combination. She had a large can of wasp spray. The spray itself might sting his eyes. If the aerosol propellant was flammable, it gave her a flamethrower with a range of fifteen feet.
Think, Dani. You do this for a living. Talk him out of it.
If her diagnosis was correct, her best chance would be to convince him that she was a human being and not an object. She needed to make him feel something. Everybody wanted to talk and be understood and feel seen and valuable. Was it possible to find some small part within Amos that could feel connected to another human being?
People wanted credit for the things they’d done, wanted to feel validated. If she showed empathy, could she receive it in return? Perhaps that was her way in.
“So was killing Julie Leonard Logan’s idea or yours?” she said. “Or were you a team, like those two kids at Columbine?”
Amos didn’t answer.<
br />
“Did you know he’s fled the country?” Dani said. “It’s looking like he’s going to get away with it. With his father’s money, he’ll be able to stay hidden for years. I don’t think we’ll ever find him.”
“Logan Gansevoort never had an original idea in his life,” Amos said.
“That’s what I thought,” Dani said. “This took a higher intelligence than anything Logan could come up with, but the police think it was all him.”
“Who cares?” Amos said.
“It’s not fair though,” Dani said. “After the way he took credit for the Pinewood Derby car in Cub Scouts, when you did all the work …”
“Who cares?” Amos said.
“Or was that planned too? You knew one day you were going to need him?”
Keep him talking.
“Let bygones be begonias,” Amos said with a smirk.
He thought he was clever, Dani realized. She smiled, to acknowledge how clever he was.
“He thought you were playing a prank on the others,” she said. “But he didn’t know you were going to kill Julie for real and then make the others think they’d done it, did he?”
“Kogo eto volnuet?” Amos said. “That means ‘who cares’?”
“How is it that you’ve remained fluent in Russian?” she asked him. “Most kids who learn a second language so young forget the first one if they don’t have anybody to practice with.”
“Vy skoro umryete,” he said.
“Please translate,” she said. “I want to understand you.”
“I said, ‘You will soon be dead,’” he replied calmly. “Kogo eto volnuet? Who cares about anything?”
“It seems to me you must have cared,” Dani said. “I can imagine why you didn’t like the kids at the party. I’m sure they all must have made fun of you or hurt you in some way or another. Why didn’t you just kill all of them when you had the chance? That’s what I don’t understand.”
And then, suddenly, she did. Her own words looped back at her. “Peer acceptance is a powerful force among teens.”
“But you didn’t want to kill them,” she said. “You wanted to put them in the same hell that you’re in. You wanted them to know what it feels like to kill somebody. Because if they did, then they’d know how you feel. And then you wouldn’t be so lonely.”
The way that Amos paused told her she’d made some kind of sense to him.
“Who cares?” he said.
Amos set the fireplace poker on the kitchen table and the cleaver next to it, out of Dani’s reach but close enough that he could reach them. Then he reached into the pouch of his hooded St. Adrian’s sweatshirt and withdrew a small black nylon zippered bag, from which he removed a syringe and a bottle of white powder. The syringe was filled with a liquid.
Amos set the bottle and the syringe on the table.
“Is that what you used on Julie?” Dani asked. She heard the water boiling behind her. Throwing boiling water in Amos’s face might work …
She heard a meow from beneath the table.
Before she could stop him, Arlo jumped up into Amos’s lap. Amos caught the cat. Dani hesitated. Another opportunity to catch him off guard had come and gone. She couldn’t allow it to happen again.
Be ready.
Amos smiled, then picked up the cleaver and waved it in front of the cat’s face. The cat thought Amos was playing and tried to paw the blade of the cleaver.
“Do you want me to shave you, kitty?” Amos said, scraping the blade against the cat’s coarse whiskers.
“How’d you come up with the drug cocktail?” Dani asked. “Did you inject Julie because she wouldn’t drink the punch? You put the drugs in the punch, right? The zombie juice. But why Julie?”
“Why not?” Amos said. “She was stupid. She’d do anything I told her to do.”
He gestured that she should make them both tea. She considered her options. The teakettle was heavy. She could knock him out, maybe even kill him, if she hit him with a clean blow, but her odds of hitting him with a clean blow were slim. Talking him down from any sense of urgency was still her best option.
“Was Julie in love with you?” Dani asked. “And you couldn’t trust that?”
He laughed out loud. “Who cares? Really,” he said, sliding the syringe across the table to her and gesturing, with a lift of his chin, that he wanted her to inject the drugs into her vein. “If you use that, you won’t feel a thing. If you don’t, you’ll feel everything.”
Dani looked at the syringe.
“It’s up to you,” Amos said, placing the blade of the cleaver against the throat of the cat. “You can’t stop what’s going to happen.”
Dani looked at the hypodermic syringe. She wondered how fast the drugs acted. Even if she managed to jab Amos with it, it probably wouldn’t act fast enough to slow an attack.
“I want you to understand something,” Dani said, hoping to buy more time. “It’s not too late. I can testify that you don’t know the nature of what you’re doing. You don’t know it’s wrong. Or that your conduct is the product of a mental disease or defect. There are court rules that may apply. The Durham rule is one.”
“The McNaughton rule would be another,” he replied. “A disease of the mind. It’s amazing what you can learn online.”
“So you know,” she said. “There might be a way out of this for you.”
“Innocent by reason of insanity? ‘Delusional thinking,’” Amos said. “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV, page 814, I believe. If you can prove I entertain false beliefs, you can diagnose schizophrenia and say I can’t appreciate the criminality of my actions.”
“Do you?” Dani asked.
“Do I what?”
“Entertain false beliefs?”
“How can a belief be true or false?” he said. “I believe in the flag, Mom, and apple pie.”
He moved the cat to the floor, lifted the cleaver, pulled it back as if aiming to throw it at Dani, then brought his arm slowly forward, stopping at the point of release. She slid his mug of tea across the table to him.
“Was that the idea? To make it look crazy?” Dani asked him. “Why the ritual? Did you want to maximize the terror? Or the humiliation? What were you going to do with the video you made? Who were you going to show it to?”
He gave an exaggerated shrug. “YouTube maybe?” he mocked. “Think how famous I’d be.” He looked at his tea.
“Do you have any milk?” he asked. “Don’t get up. You’ve done so much already. I’ll get it.” He switched the cleaver to his left hand and held the blade to Dani’s throat while he opened the refrigerator with his right hand.
“One percent?” he said. “You don’t have any whole milk?”
“I must have used it up,” Dani said, feeling the sharpness of the blade against her skin.
Amos took a half gallon of milk and poured some into his mug. For a moment, he took his eyes off Dani to focus on what he was doing, but he still held the weapon. He put the milk back in the refrigerator and sat down again, gently tapping the glass tabletop with the cleaver.
The noise startled Dani. She jumped in her chair. She took a deep breath.
“The medical examiner said Julie was already dead when you burned her,” she said. “Why disfigure her? For whose benefit? Who were you sending a message to?”
Amos smirked. “Your medical examiner may have been wrong. It’s too bad you weren’t my therapist,” he said. “We could have had so much fun figuring me out. You could write a book about me.”
“I’d like to,” Dani said. Perhaps this was what he wanted. “I could make you world famous. Seriously. Would you like that?”
“You’re pretty,” he said. “Like my mother.”
“She should have helped you, shouldn’t she?” Dani said. “She should have done something to protect you from your father.”
Amos said nothing.
“You were so helpless,” Dani said. “Drugging Julie was a way to make her helpless. Is that
why you want to drug me? To make me understand what it was like? Because if your mother had understood, she would have done something. But you did what you had to do and killed your father.”
Amos appeared to freeze at the mention of his father. Dani knew now that she’d touched a nerve, but she needed to be careful not to push Amos any further. He needed to feel understood, not antagonized.
“Or your brothers. They should have done something about it,” she said. “They were bigger than you. They were stronger than you. They should have protected you, but they didn’t lift a finger. You had to be the one to do something about it. Were they the ones you made the video for? To show them what their helpless little brother Alexei was capable of?”
“Shut up,” Amos said.
“I’m not blaming you,” Dani said. “If you’d killed your father in this country, it might even have been ruled a justifiable homicide. You would have gotten help. You can still get help. I could help you. I know you don’t think you need to be helped, because what you did to your father was righteous, wasn’t it? It was righteous and holy, so why repent?
“I’m not judging you for what you did, Amos. But things aren’t really working out for you right now, are they? I can help you get your life back on track.”
“This would be more interesting if you were as smart as you think you are,” Amos said, finishing his tea with a slurp.
“I’m not your mother, Amos,” Dani said. “Neither was Julie. Your mother’s the one who should have protected you. She’s the one who abandoned you.”
“Stop talking,” Amos commanded.
Suddenly Dani understood the real reason for the way Amos killed Julie.
“Have you ever heard the saying ‘The eyes are the window to the soul’? That’s what you were trying to do to Julie, wasn’t it? To your mother?”
She watched his hands. The left gripped the handle of the cleaver. The right held the fireplace poker.
“You were trying to destroy her soul,” Dani said. “The soul resides within the heart. Or the eyes. So you burned them out. Was that it? To send it to hell? You wanted to send your mother’s soul to hell?”
