Hold it together.
She managed to get out, "We'll just check dental records in San Pascal County," before she felt as if she was going to be sick.
Count to three.
One, two, three. Let it pass. They're dead. She's dead. They're pain is gone. They went to sleep, like a patient on an operating table. They didn't know. They didn't feel it.
She could tell herself all of this and believe it, but the one thing that she knew was a lie:
They were not afraid.
Of course they were. You keep them for nearly a day. You take them and then you keep them somewhere. Where? Do they know you? Are you a friend of the family? What is your connection to them? And why do you want them for such a short period of time? What's erupting in you after ten or fifteen hours with them? You don't rape them. You don't torture them. What do you get from them that you need? What is it you want? What is compelling you for three days in a row to expose yourself to suspicion and discovery and arrest and even death, to go to their front yards or to their neighborhoods and get them to go with you.
Why now? Why these days?
Is it Christmas? Did you do this before? If you did, we'd know. You're still young. Not too young. But you're not thirty yet. I can tell. You are frustrated. You look at these kids. They have something you want. You can only get it by taking them. And then, you have to kill them. Without hurting them in any way that we can tell.
And, once they're dead, you have to attack them.
Once they're beyond life.
You make them angels.
Do you think you're protecting them? Is there something that you're stopping by killing them?
She took a deep breath, feeling it come over her again. The sense she had in those few murder cases she’d worked on. The sense that she understood the killer in some small way. “He's new to this. Something happened to him and he snapped. Some pressure built up, and our guy is going on pure instinct. He's trying to control it. He's trying to hold back. You use a knife if you want to obliterate someone's face. You don't use your teeth. You don't bite them all over after they're dead, unless you get sadistic, sexual pleasure from it. But not our guy. He doesn’t want to hurt them. He doesn’t want them in pain. My guess is, either there are two killers, or…”
Fasteau ignored her. He went to one of the other tables.
The coroner kept his gaze on her. "Jane?"
“Or,” she continued, “One guy with got two distinct personalities in his head. Both of them, killers. One is just insane. The other is a sadistic monster.” She glanced up from the body.
Thoughts come to her, but she doesn't say them aloud.
You're a frustrated artist. Maybe. No. These are definitely angels. These are messages. Are you God? Do you believe in God? Are you doing this because Christmas is coming? Is that it? These are Christmas angels? Angels. Blood angels. Red angels. Bird wings. Flight. Found in or near rivers or streams. Cold streams. Water. Liquid. God. Angel. Devil. Fallen angel. You're religious. You have these conflicting thoughts. You want us to see them as angels. You want us to know what you are making angels. You're showing us — or someone — angels. Angels are a message. To us? To find you? You could bury these children somewhere. But you're putting them out for us, each day. It's your game. Are you afraid? Do you not want to do this? Do you want us to find you? You want us to find you because part of you wants to stop this. You believe in God. Or you mock God. But you have this in you, this terrible thing.
You can't control it, and it's coming too fast.
Something is taking you over.
Then the one that made her feel cold.
Possessing you.
Something else is living inside you. You have a conflict. You kill these children. You cut off the wings of the birds. Water fowl. Big wings. Angel wings. But you don't want to. You want to stop. But there's something inside you that keeps going. Maybe at night. Maybe at dawn, you put the bodies out for us. But at night, something else comes through. Something you can't control.
It annoyed her when her mind started spinning on its own like this. She knew the people who perpetrated this kind of crime were evil. She had no other word for them. They were not misunderstood. They were not passive victims of a larger world. There was genuine evil among humankind. She had seen it firsthand.
But something in her brain always tried to understand the killer.
To catch the perpetrator, you had to get inside the perp's head.
She stood over the metal table and glanced at the others around it.
For just a second, she imagined the moment when the killer strung the two torn bird's wings together with the wire coat hanger.
"Those are duck wings? Geese?" she asked.
The pathologist glanced at the evidence in the plastic bag that lay beside the victim's body. "Sure. A duck."
"So, we're looking at parks. Bodies of water. Someone living nearby. Someone who sees these birds a lot and can get them easily."
"You're good," the coroner said, out of the blue, looking up from his work at the second metal table. "Water's in the lungs of numbers one and two. He drowned them. Strangely, there was a little burn in the throat."
"Burn?" Tryon asked.
"Not much. Like soup. Like they'd been given soup, but it was the water. I think hot water was used. No real scalding on the face, but the water was hot that they drowned in."
"He puts them to sleep, then drowns them," Tryon said, mostly to himself.
Jane appreciated Tryon, even when she didn't always like the assignments he passed to her. The entire team was somber. It was the difference between finding adult victims and child victims. In cases of adult murder, there was seriousness, but also the nervous laughter and chit-chat — a way of removing oneself from the gruesomeness of the metal table. But in the case of a child death, generally, there was an aura of enormous tragedy. It was the human part of all of them, and Jane felt that those gathered around these corpses paid them respect, even in the examination of the minutiae of their deaths.
"He doesn't want them to suffer," she said, nearly a whisper.
"Jane?" Sykes asked, looking up from a small plastic evidence bag.
"He likes them," she said, speaking up. "He doesn't sexually touch them. He doesn't cut them. Doesn't shoot them. Doesn't seem to have tortured them in anyway. He puts them to sleep. Then washes them in hot water. Maybe the drowning is accidental, but I doubt it. He washes them to get them clean. maybe. He's religious. I can feel it. He has a religious mania. That's why he makes them look like angels. He's sending them to heaven. Pure. Washed. He's showing us that he's doing that. Or showing someone. Maybe God. I think he's going to crack and show himself to us soon. Tell me about the families. Do we know them yet?"
Chapter Twenty-Five
1
After putting the little bird in its cage, it feels the rumbling of the Other One coming out of itself. It runs up the path of the hill. The path is all muddy, and its shoes get suctioned, but it keeps running until it gets to the house above the Mad Place.
It nearly breaks down the door, because the Other One is getting loose, and the only way to control the Other One is energy release. It hears all the angels singing, but it covers its ears.
It first checks in on its mother, who is sleeping. The visiting nurse has come and gone, but left a new set of pills on the dresser, and has replenished the morphine in the drip.
It then goes into its bedroom, and there is Monica, lying face down on the bed, wrapped up in the quilt, but her skin pale and naked beneath it.
It takes off its clothes, dropping its shirt and trousers as it steps forward into the room, shutting the door behind it.
It can't control what the Other One wants.
The Other One is lusting.
The lust is evil.
But it can turn on the valve. Let the lust out. Let the sin out.
Let the perversion out.
Monica is a whore.
Monica is a sinner.
It goes and lays down on the bed, and presses its thing in between her thighs, and she groans, waking up from deep sleep. She has been asleep for less than six hours, and she doesn't like this.
But it doesn't care.
The Other One is out.
The Devil.
2
"What the hell are you doing Duane? Not now."
"Now."
"No. Get off me."
"Now."
"I said —"
"Bitch."
"You — don't you touch me."
"Whore."
"You son of a bitch."
"Shut up. She'll hear you."
"Like I care —"
Three slaps.
"Now."
"You asshole. Don't you hit me ever again. I am carrying your baby. Your baby. Don't you ever hit me. Again."
"Now."
3
The Devil presses itself into her. She fights it, but the Devil won't let her go, and the friction she creates when she lashes against it only makes the Devil stronger as it bucks and moans and growls against her ear as it takes her there.
A white hot feeling of moisture and anger all in that one spot, where it has her between her thighs.
WHORE!
SHE WILL GIVE BIRTH TO THE BEAST! SHE WILL BRING ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD WITH THE BIRTH OF THE ANTICHRIST!
It feels the hammers in its head, and the sound of its father's voice shouting from the stone angel in the Mad Place. Shouting about THE DEVIL LIVES IN YOUR HEART AND YOU MUST SCOURGE THE BEAST FROM YOU! YOU MUST RAVAGE THE FLESH AND SAVAGE THE CREATURE THAT COMMANDS YOU TO EVIL!
It wants her. Wants her stinky body. Her putrid flesh. It wants her sex. Her every fold. Her innards. Her privates. Her devil passage.
Wants to bite and tear her. To put his face into her womb and find where the baby is growing. It wants to rip it out of her and hold it in its teeth while her blood runs down its face.
It presses its devil member into her.
Ah, it thinks. Ah.
And then, something within it explodes.
Like a bomb in its head.
And the release comes.
Too soon.
But the release makes the cage door close again.
It falls against her, and she swears at it. She shoves back, and it rolls off her. Her curses float off into the air, unheard. She takes up the quilt draws it to one side, wrapping herself in it, covering her face with pillows.
Inside her, its son.
The Beast.
It lies there, staring at the ceiling.
Bringing the end of the world into flesh.
Just like its daddy said it would.
Then, it closes its eyes and journeys into the wet tissues of Hell.
Chapter Twenty-Six
1
Dr. Elise Conroy's office. Daylight shattered by rain, beyond the window.
Trey Campbell, across from her.
Silence.
Silence broken.
"I've consulted with these investigative teams before," she said. "On each case where I was called in to help profile the killer, they never caught the guys until after too many bodies had piled up. I've had seven years here, and during that time, two previous consults. In one case, they never caught the killer at all. They're not going to catch him in time. Not to save my son. He kills after sundown. Before morning. So far. That's the best they've figured out." Her voice, cold and distant, as if she were trying to move away from the problem in her mind.
Trey knew one thing about the psychiatrists at Darden State that was a key to their personalities. It probably was why they had studied psychiatry in the first place: they knew, within themselves, how the human mind had too many doors inside it. That some locked. Some opened. Some never opened. Some were wedged open and should be closed.
As he watched her, he wondered what door she was closing inside herself. If she was trying to keep the one closed that had hope in it. Or if she was trying desperately to open that door herself. By herself. Within herself.
But he was fairly sure she had closed a door. She looked as if she'd locked it and thrown away the key.
Her face, smooth, set.
She was a woman who had made up her mind, had locked a door, had opened another.
It worried him.
It even scared him a little.
2
She drew a cigarette out from the pack on her desk. She shot him a look that he translated as: don't tell me it's illegal to smoke on premises. I break this rule all the time. Screw the rules.
Trey reached across Dr. Elise Conroy's desk to steady her hand as she finally lit her cigarette.
Elise Conroy took a drag off her cigarette. “They’ve already had police on this. The FBI is stepping in. I know they won’t find him. At least not in time. They threw me off — told me to go home and get some rest. God damn it. My damn babysitter didn't even know it happened.” She brought her hand over her eyes to hide the tears. She let out a string of curses as she pressed the palms of her hands against her eyes.
"Could he just be missing?"
At first she didn't respond. Then, she looked up at him as if seeing him for the first time. "You know Scoleri."
Trey nodded.
"Fallon came to me this morning. He said it was urgent. He said that Scoleri had told him that something terrible would happen to me today. I asked him what. All he would tell me was that Scoleri told him something terrible and that it had to do with Lucas. That Fallon even knew my son's name was something. He may have seen his picture, but he wouldn't know his name. Maybe he overheard it. I don't know. I don't care. I went to see Scoleri, because I thought someone here must have mentioned it to him. Dr. Brainard, perhaps. Someone who had heard when I heard. Scoleri told me, point blank, something that I can't get out of my head."
"He knows the killer?"
"No. He told me that I should've just taken Lucas to the beach this morning."
"Why?"
"Trey," she said, her voice hard as if she had come to the most difficult decision of her life. "Because that is what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to take Lucas to the beach today. I came here to pick up some papers. Between the time I left home, and the thirty minutes I was here, Lucas..." She paused. "I wanted to take a few days off at the start of Lucas's Christmas break. We hadn't spent enough time together. This damn job. Other things. I could consult on the Red Angel case just a few hours a day, and then be home for the rest. And Scoleri knew. He told me that he gets messages from the man who took my son. And then he told me that the beach would have been awful today, anyway, what with the rain."
"Okay," Trey said, his mind crackling with ideas that came at him too quickly. "Scoleri has some contact. We don't know who. Let's find out."
3
Elise ordered sandwiches from the canteen to be delivered to her office. She spread out the files that she had on Scoleri. "I give you full access."
He glanced up at her. "You sure you want me to see this."
"The rules of this place are not going to save my son," she said.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
1
In Tryon's office, in Riverside, Detective Jane Laymon picks up a Styrofoam cup and pours coffee into it from the small Mr. Coffee machine on the corner table. Then, turning to Tryon, who sits at his desk, "So when does CASMIRC get to work on this?"
CASMIRC is the Child Abduction and Serial Murder Investigative Resources Center that the FBI uses in cases like this one.
"They already have. I heard from Tommy over at the Bureau yesterday. They've been running priors, trying to see if this is in line with some kidnappings from three years ago down in San Diego."
"But it's not," she says. Then, "You need to get better coffee."
He ignores the comment. "You're not going lead on this one, Jane. I'm sorry to say."
"I suspected as much. Who is it?"
"Jenkins. And then Sykes, over in your area."
"Well," she says, tilting her head slightly to the side. "They're the best."
"They'll mainly going to be working with Tommy and Bill Murphy on most of the forensics."
"So, what's my connection?"
"You'll work on your side of the line."
"Sure. But why call me in at all?"
"I think you're good. You've got the goods. You have intuition on your side. A knack for this. That's talent. And I need talent on a case like this. We're fucked, here. We have a nut killing a kid daily, leaving them out in the open, and we don't have a thing, yet." He pauses, does a back and forth of his head like he's weighing options. "Plus, you know the terrain. Every kid was taken from your backyard, not ours."
"But they get dumped in your sandbox. And San Bernardino's. And mine."
"Yeah," Tryon says. "It just screws with us when that happens."
"We'll get him."
"You should come to work for me."
"I thought I was. At least in this limited capacity." She urgently wanted to change the subject. "Look, we have a report of one kid missing already. So far. My guess is that our guy is going one after another. Grabbing the kids and offing them pretty fast."
"A sexual predator."
"Not quite. Nothing evidentiary to suggest sexual contact. This is a psychotic who just snapped."
"Just?"
"I think so. Sykes thinks otherwise. He thinks there'll be priors. I don't think so. Or if there are, it'll be juvy stuff. Maybe. Takes ten years or more to work up to this psychosis. Completely disordered mind. Has a focus, but has cracked. Something was always wrong, but just got worse." She glanced over at him. Tryon watched her with fascination. "Hey, I was a double major: criminal justice and forensics psychology."
"I hope we don't lose you to the Bureau someday."
"I like being a cop," she said. "My dad was a cop. My mom worked dispatch in San Bernardino for twenty-six years. I like this life."
Criminally Insane: The Series (Bad Karma, Red Angel, Night Cage Omnibus) (The Criminally Insane Series) Page 29
