Twenty minutes later, I was downtown, and I realized that I'd ridden almost directly to Dr. Neblin's office. It was closed, naturally, locked and hollow and dark. I stopped pedaling and just sat there, maybe for ten minutes, watching the wind whip curls of snow into the air, twirl them around and fling them into brick walls. I didn't have anything to do, anywhere to go, or anyone to talk to. I didn't have one single reason to exist.
All I had was Mr. Crowley.
There was a pay phone at the end of the street; the same one I'd used to call 911 a month before. Without knowing why, I propped my bike against it, dropped in a quarter, and dialed Mr. Crowley's cell phone. While it rang, I pulled up the tail of my T-shirt and wrapped it over the end of the phone to hide my voice, praying that would actually work. After three rings, he answered.
"Hello?"
"Hello," I said. I didn't know what to say.
"Who is this?"
I paused. "I'm the one who's been sending you notes."
He hung up.
I swore, pulled out another quarter, and dialed again.
"Hello?"
"Don't hang up."
Click.
I only had two quarters left. I dialed again.
"Leave me alone," he said. "If you know so much about me, then you know what I'll do if I find you." Click.
I had to think of something to keep him on the line; I needed to talk to someone, to anyone, demon or not. I dropped in my last quarter and dialed again.
"I said—!"
"Does it hurt?" I asked, interrupting him. I could hear him breathing heavily, hot and angry, but he didn't hang up. "You ripped off your own arm," I said, "and cut open your own belly. I just want to know if it hurts."
He waited, saying nothing.
"Nothing you do makes sense," I said. "You hide some bodies and you don't hide others. You smile at a guy one minute and rip his heart out the next. I don't even know what you—"
"It hurts like hell." He stayed silent a moment. "It hurts every time."
He answered me. There was something in his voice—some emotion I couldn't identify. Not quite happiness, not quite fatigue.
It was something in the middle.
Relief?
Months of curiosity poured out in a flood. "Do you have to wait for something to break down before you replace it?" I asked. "Do you have to steal parts from people? And what about that guy in Arizona—Emmett Openshaw? What did you steal from him?"
Silence.
"I stole his life."
"You killed him," I said.
"I didn't just kill him," said Crowley, "I stole his life. He would have had a long one, I think. As long as this, at least. He would have gotten married and had kids."
That didn't sound right.
"How old was he?" I asked.
"Thirty, I think. I tell people I'm seventy-two."
I had assumed Openshaw was older, like the recent victims. "You hid his body—well enough that no one ever found it— so why didn't you hide Jeb Jolley's? Or the two after that?"
Silence. A door closed.
"You still don't know, do you?"
"You're acting like a first-time killer," I said, trying to puzzle through it. "You've gotten better with each one, and you've started hiding the bodies, which makes sense if you've never done this before, but you have. Is it all an act? But why would you pretend to be inexperienced if you could just keep it completely quiet instead?"
"Hang on," he said, and coughed. He muffled the phone, but I could still hear loud coughs. Fake coughs, it sounded like, and something else behind them. A rumble. He unmuffled the phone, but it was harder to hear than before—there was static on the line, or white noise.
What was he doing?
"I acted inexperienced because I was," he said. "I've taken more lives than you can guess, but Jeb was the first one I . . . didn't keep."
"You didn't keep? But—" Could he keep souls? Could he absorb lives as well as body parts?
Or could he take lives instead of body parts?
"You took Emmett's whole body," I said, "and his shape. And you took someone else's body before that, and someone else's before that. It makes sense. You never had to hide the bodies before because you took everything, and left your old body behind. That's why there was so much sludge in Emmett's house—you discarded an entire body there, not just a part, and you—"
Ding . . . ding . . . ding. . . .
"What's that?" I asked.
"What's what?" he said.
"That noise. It sounded like a . . . " I slammed down the phone and grabbed my bike, looking wildly down the road.
It was a turn signal. Crowley was in his car, and he was looking for me.
There was no one on Main Street. I jumped on my bike and shot down to the corner, swerving around it too quickly and sliding on the ice. He wasn't on this street either. I righted myself and pedaled as hard as I could to the next corner and spun around that as well, in the other direction, away from his house and the route he was probably following.
That's why he said so much. Mr. Crowley was on a cell phone, and he had caller ID—he must have figured out I was on a pay phone, so he kept me talking while he went outside, started his car, and went to look for me. There were only two or three pay phones in town, and he was probably checking them all—the Flying J, the gas station by the wood plant, and the gas station where I'd been on Main. It had been closed for Christmas, thank goodness—there would be no clerks to describe me when kindly old Mr. Crowley showed up asking questions. But Christmas was also a problem—every building downtown was closed, every door locked, and every store empty. There was nowhere for me to hide.
What would be open on Christmas in a tiny town like Clayton? The hospital—but no, there was probably a pay phone there as well, and Crowley might drop by to check it. I heard a car and turned straight off the sidewalk onto a snow-covered lawn, forcing my way along the side of an apartment building.
There was a gap between two buildings, and halfway down a gas meter; I squeezed around it and crouched down on the other side, eyeing the street at the end of a long, brick canyon.
The car I heard didn't pass by—I didn't know who it had been, or where it had been going, only that I needed to hide.
I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening there, shivering in the snow. I could feel my body reacting, shutting down from cold, but I didn't dare move. I imagined a fire-eyed Mr. Crowley driving back and forth across the town, weaving a net tighter and tighter around me. When it had been dark nearly an hour,
I dragged my bike back out, my limbs stiff and my hands and Feet burning with cold. I made my'way home, saw that Crowley's car was parked neatly in his driveway, and went upstairs.
The house was empty and quiet; everyone had left.
14
My phone conversation with Mr. Crowley ran through my head over and over for the next three days, to the exclusion of all else. Mom came home Christmas night crying and shouting that they'd spent the whole day looking for me, and where had I gone, and she was so glad I was safe, and a thousand other things that I didn't listen to because I was too busy thinking about Mr. Crowley. The day after Christmas, Margaret came back and the three of us went out to a steakhouse, but I ignored them and my food, deep in thought. I'm sure they thought I was despondent because of Dad's Christmas present, but I'd practically forgotten about that—all I could think about were Mr. Crowley's hints and confessions, and there was no room in my head for anything else. By Wednesday, Mom had stopped trying to cheer me up, though I sometimes caught her staring at me from across the room. I was grateful to finally have some peace and quiet.
Mr. Crowley had all but admitted to me that he used to steal entire bodies, but that now he was only stealing pieces. It made sense in some ways—it explained why the DNA from the sludge kept showing up as the same person, because the whole body had come from Emmett Openshaw. It also explained why he was so good at killing, but so poor at hiding the evidence. He probably
killed Jeb Jolley out of desperation, dying for lack of a good kidney, and simply didn't think ahead about what to do with the body—he'd never had to do anything with it before. As the year went on and he killed more people, he got better at it, and even started looking for anonymous victims, like the lone drifter he took to Freak Lake. Even now, a month, later, nobody knew that man was missing, and that the Clayton Killer had claimed another victim just before Thanksgiving. Nobody knew about the one he'd killed just before Christmas, either—the one I'd missed— so I assumed that was a drifter as well. There could be others that even I didn't know about.
It also gave me a pretty good idea of why he never took more than one piece of each victim. If taking the whole body also gave him that body's appearance, he was probably worried that talcing too many pieces from one corpse would start to overwhelm the appearance he was trying to maintain. His body could deal with an arm here and a kidney there, but if too much of that victim started to creep in, he might lose the Bill Crowley identity he was fighting so hard to keep.
So yes, he was getting better at killing this way, instead of the old way, but the question remained: why had he changed?
And why was there a forty-year gap with no killing at all? I tried to put myself into his place—a demon, wandering the Earth, killing someone and stealing his body and starting n new life. If I could do anything I wanted, why would I be here in Clayton County? If I could be as young and as strong as I wanted, why would I be old—so old I was falling apart? If I could kill one person and disappear without a trace, why would I hang around, killing a dozen people, and leaving more and more evidence that the cops could use to find me? ".
I tried to build another psychological profile, starting with the same key question: what did the killer do that he didn't have to do? He stayed in one place. He maintained one identity. He got old. And he killed, over and over—that had to mean something. Did he enjoy it? He didn't seem to. But if I'd managed to figure out how he worked, then killing this many people was definitely something he didn't have to do.
He had another option. So why was he doing it?
If he didn't have to do something, that meant he wanted to do it. Why did he want to get old? Why did he want to stay in this godforsaken town in the middle of this icy nowhere? What did Clayton have that the demon couldn't find anywhere else?
I couldn't figure it out on my own; I needed Dr. Neblin. I had an appointment with him on Thursday, which gave me one day to plan my strategy—how to get the answers I needed without giving anything away.
Mom reminded me about my appointment over breakfast the next morning, and seemed genuinely surprised that afternoon when I actually left without prompting and rode my bike downtown. I suppose, from her point of view, it was the first active thing I'd done since running out on Christmas day; for me, it was just a chance to talk to someone I trusted.
"How was Christmas?" asked Neblin, cocking his head to the side. He did that when he was trying to hide something— probably the fact that he'd already heard all about Christmas from Mom. Dr. Neblin was a terrible liar; someday I'd have to play poker with him.
"I have a scenario for you," I said. "I want your opinion."
"What kind of scenario?"
"A fake psych profile," I said. "I've been doing them for fun over Christmas break, and I've got one that I'm kind of hung up on."
"Okay," he said. "Fire away."
"Let's say you're a shape-shifter," I said. "You can change your face, and go anywhere you want, and be anyone you want to be. You can be any age, any size, any nationality, and do anything you want. Now imagine that you're in a bad situation, forced to do things you don't like. If you had this kind of freedom, why would you choose to stay?"
"So it's question of risk and reward," he said. "I stay me and live with hardship, or I escape the hardship at the cost of losing myself."
"You're not yourself," I said, and winced at how exposed I felt—I was opening myself to a lot of uncomfortable questions, especially if he thought I was obliquely referring to myself.
"You lost yourself a long time ago, and you've been a string of somebody elses for who knows how long."
"Then it's a question of identity as well," he said. "If I'm somebody else, is that as good as being me? If I can't be myself anymore, am I better off being nobody at all, or choosing a new self to become?"
"That's right," I said, nodding. "You can stay one person, in one place, doing one thing forever, and hate it, or you can be free of everything—no responsibilities, no problems, no baggage."
He stared at me a moment. "Is there something you want to tell me?"
"I want you to tell me what would make you stay in that situation," I said. "I know you think this is about me, but it's not—I can't explain. Now seriously—you've got nothing on the one side, and everything on the other. Why would you stay?"
He thought about it for a couple of minutes, tapping his pen on his pad and frowning. This was why I came to Dr.
Neblin—he took me seriously, no matter what I said or how crazy I sounded.
"One more question," he said. "Am I a sociopath?"
"What?"
"This is your puzzle," said Neblin, "and as we have often discussed, you have strong sociopathic tendencies. I want to know if I should be answering from a standard emotional state, or from the lack of one."
"What's the difference?"
Dr. Neblin smiled. "There's your answer. You said that the second option, leaving and starting a string of brand new lives, had freedom—it had no 'baggage.' Where a sociopath sees baggage, a typical personality would see emotional connections. Friends, family, loved ones—not all of us can give those up so easily. They define us, and they make us who we are. Sometimes the personalities around us are what make us complete."
Emotional connections. Loved ones.
"Kay."
"What?"
"I . . . I said okay."
It was Kay Crowley. Mr. Crowley was really in love with her—not pretending to be, not using her for cover, he was really, truly in love with her. I'd tried putting myself into Crowley's place and it didn't work, not because his mind was too different, but because mine was. The demon loved his wife.
"I have to go," I said.
"You just got here."
Crowley had done it maybe a hundred times before, maybe a thousand times, jumping from body to body, life to life. He moved to a new town and started fresh, and when his demon powers couldn't sustain a body anymore, he just dropped it and moved on. He'd done it in Arizona with Emmett Openshaw, and fled here to Clayton County to hide and start over— but then he'd met Kay, and now it was different. Leaving this body meant leaving her, and he couldn't do it, so he was patching himself up piecemeal instead—fixing each part as it broke down instead of starting over fresh.
"John?"
"Huh?"
"Is there something you want to talk about?" asked Dr.
Neblin.
"No, no, I . . . have to go. I have to think."
"Call me, John," said Neblin, standing up and pulling out a business card. "Call me if you want to talk, about anything at all." He wrote a second number, his home number, I assumed, on the back of the card, and handed it to me. I realized abruptly that he was worried—lines of concern etched his face like wounds, and he was watching me anxiously
"Thanks," I mumbled, and left the office, picking up my coat from the waiting room and going downstairs. I got on my bike and rode home, not aimlessly, not desperately, not nervously; I was calm for the first time in weeks. I'd found his weakness.
Love.
I spent the evening locked in my room, going over my notes and watching out the window for Mr. Crowley. Love was the chink in his armor, I knew, but I hadn't come up with a plan to exploit it yet. I crafted and discarded a dozen different ideas, desperate to find one that could stop him before he killed again.
But he was already growing very sick. He'd strike soon, and I wasn't ready.
Sure enough,
a little after midnight Mr. Crowley staggered out to his car. He looked worse than I'd ever seen him—he was waiting as long as possible to fix himself. I wondered if he might have to replace more than one thing, and then I wondered if that was even possible—if he took too much from one person, did he become that person whether he wanted to or not? That would explain why he replaced just one organ at a time.
I opened my door quietly; Mom was still awake, watching Letterman. I closed it again, locked it, and went to the window.
It was a long drop to the ground, but Crowley was getting away.
I bundled up in my coat and put on my newest acquisition—a black ski mask—and jumped.
Mr. Crowley was too far gone for me to follow his lights, so I rode as fast as I could to the Flying J, hoping he would look there for another drifter. The Flying J was hard to reach by bike, so I rode to the base of the hill behind it and hiked up, avoiding the freeway and the lights. Crowley was just pulling out—alone. He hadn't found anyone yet. I tumbled back down the snowy hill and rode the few blocks to the freeway off-ramp, where I saw him come back into town and head over toward the wood plant. Maybe he'd try to get a night watchman or something; some innocent nobody in the wrong place at the wrong time. His car was swerving dangerously, and I realized he probably couldn't wait for a victim nobody would miss—he had to kill the first person he found. At one in the morning, that would still be almost impossible. I followed a few blocks behind, as black as the night.
He turned a few streets early, and when I reached the corner I saw him pull up behind an idling diesel cab. The truck engine turned off, the door opened, and a man jumped down; his breath floated like a ghost in the freezing air. The man jogged toward the front of the truck but Crowley got out of his car and called out to him. The man paused and called back.
I couldn't hear what either was saying. The man pointed at a house behind him—a duplex.
My heart froze. I looked up at the street sign above me: Redwood Street.
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