by James Carol
In my opinion, they should have skipped the pentobarbital. My father should have left this world struggling for his last breath, fully awake and fully aware. That still wouldn’t have come close to making amends, but it would have been a start.
‘Marion,’ I said. ‘Your parents were big John Wayne fans.’
‘Not even close.’
‘Chuck?’
Taylor laughed and made an ‘after-you’ gesture and we climbed the stairs. The flight attendant who greeted us when we ducked into the cabin was in her early fifties. Hair dyed black to disguise the grey, sensible flat shoes. She’d been hired for her ability to do the job, not her looks, which said a lot about the person who owned the plane. There was a time for looks and a time for efficiency. When it came to flight attendants, I’d take efficiency over looks any day. Flying was tedious enough without adding incompetence into the mix.
The interior of the Gulfstream was understated and subdued and reminded me of the FBI’s jets. There were none of the ostentatious touches you associated with rock stars or the Hollywood glitterati. None of the bling.
Toward the back there was a table with four black leather chairs surrounding a walnut-topped table. I got comfy in the forward-facing window seat and put my laptop case on the table. Taylor folded himself into the aisle seat opposite and stretched his legs out as far as he could. The jet started rolling and he reached for his seatbelt.
‘I wouldn’t bother,’ I told him. ‘One perk of flying in a private jet is that you don’t have to wear a seatbelt.’
‘What if we crash?’
‘If we crash, we die. That seatbelt won’t save you. Twenty-five tons of metal smashing into the ground at five hundred miles an hour, you really think that tiny strap is going to save your life?’
Taylor gave me the look. His eyes were narrowed, his brow furrowed, and he was staring at me like I’d grown an extra head. It was a look I was used to.
‘The reason the FAA insist you wear a seatbelt on take-off and landing comes down to crowd control,’ I continued. ‘If there’s an emergency the last thing you want are three hundred hysterical people running up and down the aisles. The same thing goes for the oxygen masks. That’s all about crowd control, too. Those things pump out pure oxygen. Breathe that stuff in and it leaves you feeling euphoric. Would you rather your last moments were filled with terror, or would you rather believe that you were about to reach out and touch the hand of God?’
Taylor looked at me again.
A minute later we turned onto the runway and stopped. The engines whined, and then we were propelled forward like a pebble from a slingshot. The Gulfstream lifted off in a fraction of the distance a passenger jet needed. A grind and a whine as the undercarriage retracted, then we carried on climbing at a comfortable twenty degrees. Whoever was at the stick knew his stuff. The take-off was a textbook civilian effort. No drama, no fuss, and boring as hell.
Outside the tiny porthole window, Charleston shrunk to toy-town size and Carl Tindle became nothing more than a memory. Carl wasn’t the worst I’d come across, but that didn’t make him a saint. Far from it. Carl had a thing for co-eds, and once he’d done his thing he suffocated them with a plastic bag and a leather belt. By the time I came on board his body count was up to eight.
Identifying Carl was straightforward enough and I’d managed that by the end of day one. The challenge was catching him. There was plenty of empty space in South Carolina, lots of places to hide. We eventually tracked Carl down to a remote cabin near the coast, and when he realised he was surrounded he came in quietly enough.
Unlike my father, Carl would not live long enough for the death sentence appeals to play out. Carl Tindle was a small man, a weak man, a dead man walking. He wouldn’t see the end of the year. There was every chance he’d be dead before the week was out, suicide or shanked. Prison justice was harsh and brutal, and so much more effective than the courtroom variety.
When it came to getting the job done, I knew which one I put my faith in.
3
The flight attendant appeared shortly after we’d passed through the clouds. She handed us a couple of menus, asked what we wanted to eat and drink, then disappeared to the galley at the rear. When she returned with our drinks we were still climbing. I was thinking about who owned the Gulfstream again. If I owned a private jet I’d be fussy about who borrowed it. The local sheriff’s department would be way down the list. The easiest thing would be to ask Taylor, but I wasn’t ready to go there yet.
I booted up my laptop, clicked open the film clip of Sam Galloway’s last moments, hit play and turned the computer around so Taylor could see the screen. The smell of beef bourguignon drifted from the back. If the smell was anything to go by, I’d made a good choice.
‘Watch carefully, then tell me what you see.’
I reached for my coffee and took a sip. It had come from the Blue Mountains of Jamaica and was spectacularly smooth. The conditions in the Blue Mountains are perfect for growing coffee. Rich soil, good drainage, and a climate that’s cool, misty and wet. Put that all together and you end up with some of the finest coffee known to man.
Taylor was drinking a Pepsi. He didn’t know what he was missing.
I looked over at him. Light from the screen flickered and reflected in his eyes, a series of warped, indistinct images. His discomfort was obvious in his facial expressions, and a couple of times he winced as though what he was seeing on the screen was happening to him. Taylor would also be overcompensating for the lack of sound. He wouldn’t be able to help himself. His imagination would be providing a soundtrack that owed more to every horror movie he’d ever seen than to what he was actually watching.
The grey and white in his eyes turned to orange and yellow and he winced again. He rubbed his hands together like there were flames on his fingertips and he was trying to extinguish them. Orange became black and he turned the laptop back around so it was facing me.
‘So?’ I asked.
Taylor shook his head. ‘I don’t get paid enough to have opinions on something like this, Mr Winter. This goes way above my pay grade.’
I let loose with a mock yawn, really milked it.
‘Look, I’ve been a cop for six months. I know how to write tickets. I’m so integral to the running of the department that they can afford to send me all the way up to Charleston to meet you. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this isn’t a sheriff’s uniform I’m wearing.’
‘First off, call me Winter. Secondly, interesting choice of words. You could have chosen any rank, but you chose sheriff. The man at the top. That means at some point in time, probably more than once, you’ve stood in front of a mirror and imagined yourself in a brand-new sheriff’s uniform.’
Taylor’s cheeks darkened with a blush. The contrast was nowhere near as pronounced as red on white skin, but it was definitely there. For a moment it wasn’t a two-hundred-and-eighty-pound giant sitting opposite me, it was a school kid who stood out because he’d always been a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than his classmates.
‘Also,’ I added, ‘you’re smart enough to realise the chances of that happening in northern Louisiana are zilch. So your game plan is to keep your head down, work hard, and progress through the ranks as far as you can until you’ve racked up enough experience to move to a more racially enlightened part of the country.’
Taylor reached for his Pepsi and took a drink.
‘I’m not hearing any rebuttals,’ I said.
‘There’s nothing wrong with being ambitious.’
‘Nothing at all. What’s more, I promise that if you answer my question I won’t let on to your colleagues how smart you really are.’
Another long look, but, again, no denials.
‘You dumbed down on the entrance exam, didn’t you? Played it so you passed comfortably? You could have excelled, you probably could have got the highest score in the whole history of the Dayton Sheriff’s Department, but you didn’t because the last thing you need
is for your colleagues to feel uncomfortable when they’re around you. My guess is that you’ve got that whole dumb, gentle giant act down to a fine art. You’ve had plenty of practice, right?’
Taylor didn’t deny this, either, but he didn’t have to because the guilt was written all over his face.
‘George,’ I said.
‘Like Steinbeck’s George?’ Taylor shook his head. ‘I credited you with more imagination.’
I nodded to the laptop. ‘Okay, back to business. What do you think?’
Taylor sighed and chewed at his lip, then he shook his head and said, ‘Nobody should have to die like that.’
Which echoed my first impressions. Unfortunately that was an emotional response and no use to us whatsoever. ‘Try again‚ but this time put your emotions aside.’
Taylor went to say something. He hesitated, smiled. ‘Emotion.’
‘Go on.’
‘The killer could be a robot for all the emotion he’s showing. He comes onto the screen, tips gasoline all over Sam Galloway, tosses a match on him, then walks off. He could have been lighting a barbecue. This guy’s a psychopath. It’s textbook.’
I shook my head. ‘You’re right about one thing. The lack of emotion is key here. Where you went wrong was your assumption that our firestarter is a psychopath. He isn’t.’
‘Of course he is. He didn’t just murder Galloway, he torched him. He could have killed him a dozen ways that were quicker, a bullet to the head, for example, but he didn’t. He set him on fire, and the only reason you’d do something like that is because you want your victim to suffer.’
‘And you’ve just put two and two together and got five. Sometimes that’s a good thing, but not this time.’
‘So what does four look like?’
‘Good question.’
‘You’re not going to answer, are you?’
‘Not yet.’
A couple of clicks was all it took to navigate to the webpage.
10:42:08.
This game of hangman had just started. At the moment there was only the base of the gallows and a tall back post. Another second passed and the top beam appeared. It was currently eighteen minutes after one in Dayton. Time was marching on, getting ever closer to midnight. The fact that this unsub had chosen midnight as his zero hour was another example of his flair for the dramatic. I turned the computer around so Taylor could see the screen.
‘And what do you think of this?’
White light flickered in Taylor’s eyes. One flash for every second, like a slow, steady, relaxed heartbeat. Ten seconds passed, twenty. Two more stick figures bit the dust. Taylor stared at the screen, entranced.
Thinking.
He looked over at me, grim-faced. ‘It’s a promise. He’s telling us that Sam Galloway was just the start. He’s going to kill again.’
4
‘I’ve got a question,’ said Taylor.
I pulled out my earbuds and opened my eyes. The second movement of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony turned to tin and lost its richness. I reached for my laptop and killed the sound. We were an hour into the flight, halfway to Louisiana, and 51,000 feet below us the wide empty spaces of Alabama would soon give way to Mississippi. The beef bourguignon had been every bit as good as I’d anticipated. Almost as good as the coffee.
Taylor had an earnest expression on his face and I knew what was coming next. I’d heard this particular question a thousand times. What my father had done was no secret, and people were naturally curious.
There were two main variations of the question. The first was to ask how I couldn’t have known. How was it possible to live under the same roof as a serial killer and not know what he really was?
The answer to that one was simple. My father was intelligent, manipulative and completely plausible. Unlike our firestarter, my father was a textbook psychopath. He taught math at college and was well liked by both his students and his colleagues. He created the illusion of a real life that was so believable nobody suspected a thing.
Variation number two of the question: what was it like to have a serial killer for a father? Usually I’d answer this with another question. What’s it like to have a father who’s a doctor, or an accountant, or a garbage man? More often than not‚ this answer was taken for rudeness and tended to stop the conversation dead. Ironically‚ if the person doing the asking actually stopped to think about what I’d said they would have realised they’d got their answer.
Put aside the fact that my father was a serial killer, he was just some guy who taught math and had a wife and kid at home. He worked hard to be normal. He blended in. He never beat or abused me or my mother. His worst crime was that he could occasionally be distant and controlling, but there were millions of fathers who fell into those two categories.
Until the FBI came crashing into our lives we were your average family. A little more dysfunctional than some, a little less dysfunctional than others. There were arguments and reconciliations, holidays and good times. Plenty of bad times, too. We had our share of Norman Rockwell moments, and we had our Hieronymus Bosch moments, too. Sometimes we hated each other, sometimes we tolerated each other, and occasionally we loved one another. Just a normal family, in other words.
‘Go on. Ask away‚’ I said.
Taylor hesitated, which again was pretty much par for the course. He gazed out the small porthole window, stared deep into the blue and white haze. When he turned back, the earnest expression had gone.
‘What’s with the white hair?’
I laughed and shook my head, and Taylor said ‘What?’ He was back to looking like a kid trapped in a giant’s body again. Lost and uncertain, and overly defensive.
‘It’s nothing. That wasn’t the question I was expecting, that’s all.’
‘If you don’t want to answer, I understand.’
I waved his comment away. ‘The white hair’s a genetic thing. My father went white in his twenties. My grandfather, too. I was only twenty-one.’
‘That wasn’t what I was getting at. Why don’t you dye it? I mean, you’re what, early thirties? You could pull it off. It’s not like you’re some loser who’s pretending he’s still young.’
There were a dozen ways to answer that, some more truthful than others. The real truth went back to that execution chamber in San Quentin. My father’s last words were aimed directly at me. He’d stared through the Plexiglas, stared straight at me, and mouthed three words: We’re the same. I knew he was just messing with my head, but I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t acknowledge that there was some truth in those three words.
There’s a reason I’m good at what I do. My training at Quantico is part of it, but only a small part. I know how serial criminals think. Except that doesn’t quite cut it. What I do goes deeper than just knowing. I understand them. I’ve been inside their heads, walked in their shoes. There’s something embedded in my DNA that enables me to get up close and personal with these monsters, and that DNA had to come from somewhere.
I wasn’t about to get into all that with Taylor though. A lesser truth would be to tell him that I didn’t dye my hair because my father had dyed his, but I wasn’t about to go there, either.
‘Why do you hunch your shoulders when you walk? Why do you keep your fingers curled into your palms?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Most people travel the middle road, but occasionally you get people who exist at the edge of that road. The outsiders. You and me, we’re more alike than you realise.’
Taylor snorted a laugh. ‘Yeah, right. You’re the genius profiler, and I’m the rookie cop. I could see how people might confuse us. And that’s before you get into the whole size and race thing.’
‘I said alike, not the same. Big difference. You stand out because you’re built like a mountain. I stand out because I’m good at what I do and my father murdered fifteen women. Your way of dealing with that is to try and make yourself appear smaller. That’s why you walk with a st
oop and hide your hands.’
‘And your way of dealing with it is to stand out. That’s why you don’t dye your hair. And that’s why you dress like you’re in a grunge band.’
I raised an eyebrow. ‘Grunge?’
‘You know what I’m talking about. The designer jeans, the scuffed boots, the T-shirt, the leather jacket, that hair.’ Taylor laughed. ‘You might look like you’ve just stepped out of a dumpster, but it takes time to cultivate a look like that.’
That was worth a laugh.
‘Okay,’ Taylor continued. ‘Here’s another question. Do you have any idea who the bad guy is?’
‘I’ve got a few ideas, but nothing I’m willing to share. And before you ask, it’s because a bad profile is one of the best ways to screw up a case. We need to see that crime scene before I say anything.’
‘He’s got to be smart, though. Programming that webpage couldn’t have been easy.’
‘Stop fishing.’
Taylor ignored me and said, ‘So we’re looking for someone whose computer skills are above average. I mean, I couldn’t knock up a website with a countdown on it, never mind that whole hangman thing.’
‘You really want to go there?’
Taylor answered with a nod.
‘Outsourcing,’ I said, and he gave me a puzzled look.
‘You were right about one thing: this guy is smart. How many people in Eagle Creek have those sorts of computer skills? The answer is probably none. However, for the purpose of this exercise, let’s say you have two or three. So you round them up, interview them until one of them cracks and confesses, case closed. No, if this guy had those sort of computer skills there’s no way he’d advertise the fact. He’s too smart for that.’
‘So he does what everybody else does,’ said Taylor, the words rolling out on a sigh. ‘He outsources. He gets some programmer in Mumbai or the Philippines or Thailand to write the code. They’ll do it for peanuts, and we could spend a year chasing down that lead and still be no further forward. Okay, say it: it was a dumb idea.’
