(2011) The Gift of Death

by Sam Ripley

  ‘Okay – what about thirty?’

  ‘Fifty.’ It was not so much a request as a statement. ‘I don’t like to do this – it’s against my principles – but if I do give some info to a reporter then it’s got to be worth my while, you understand.’

  ‘Okay, then. Fifty it is.’ She grappled for the money. ‘Here it is. Two twenties and a ten.’

  As she handed over the money she felt his fat fingers stroke the underside of her palm.

  ‘Which room?’ she said, pulling away from him.

  ‘No need to start acting up, lady,’ he said. ‘Only trying to be nice and friendly.’

  ‘Where’s the goddamned room?’

  ‘Number 27, second floor, right at the end.’ She tried to recall whether the disc with 27 etched into it had a key attached.

  ‘Is he in?’

  ‘I think so.’ He went to look behind the desk. ‘Yep, his key’s not here so I guess he is. So go straight up, but don’t tell him anything about our – arrangement, okay? Oh, you’ll have to take the stairs, though. Elevator’s out of order.’

  ‘Okay, thanks,’ she said, walking away from him.

  She took out her cell to check she still had a signal. There was another missed call from Josh.

  As she climbed the poorly lit stairway she felt herself growing more anxious. She tried to take a deep breath, but it was useless. Fear began to tighten her throat like a noose around her neck. She could always go back, take Cassie’s advice and call Josh or 911. But that would give Josh the satisfaction of solving the case when, from what she could gather, he’d done fuck all. No way.

  Because she was so afraid she deliberately forced herself to walk quickly down the gloomy corridor. She couldn’t quite believe she was standing outside room 27. On the other side of the door was the man who wanted to harm her, possibly even kill her. She raised her hand and knocked. She couldn’t hear anything from inside. Was he out? Could Gruen have been wrong? As she lent forward to put her ear to the wood, the door opened.

  She reared back to see a tall, white-haired man, youngish, with white skin and pink eyes. He looked like a ghost. It was a moment before Kate realised he was albino. He didn’t seem surprised to see her standing there at his door. In fact, his eyes didn’t seem to register any emotion whatsoever.

  ‘I know who you are,’ he said. His voice was gentle, almost like a whisper.

  Just as Kate opened her mouth to speak he reached out and pulled her into the darkened room. She tried to resist, but his grip on her arm was too strong. He clamped his hand over her mouth. She felt her lips press into her teeth and tasted blood. He pushed her into a chair and clamped a pad over her mouth, securing it with brown sticky tape. Then he tied her hands behind her back with a piece of rope.

  It took her a while before her eyes adjusted to the gloom – the blinds looked like they had never been opened, and the only light in the room came from the soft glow of candles. She wished she had just sat there quietly with her eyes tight shut. What she saw turned her insides to liquid.

  The room was some kind of temple devoted to a dead serial killer. Gleason was the god, the albino the ultimate worshipper. Wherever she looked she was confronted by photocopies of the face of Bobby Gleason, some which had been blown up so that his image nearly covered a whole wall. There were headlines from newspapers, tracking the case from the first killing in 1992 to Gleason’s arrest in 1997, the subsequent trial and imprisonment until his suicide in 2000. Arranged around the walls were cut-outs of the faces of young women, women Kate recognised as Elizabeth Ventura, Jane Gardener, Teresa Collins, Frances Silla and Tracey Newton. Gleason’s victims.

  On a piece of paper tacked to the ice box in the corner of the room was a list of everyone involved in the case. At the top was her name; next was Cassie’s.

  ‘You’re even more beautiful in person than in the pictures,’ he said. Again his voice was ethereal, almost insubstantial. ‘Sorry,’ he said, suddenly embarrassed. ‘I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Robert Gleason, but you can call me Bobby.’

  Kate grunted.

  ‘He was a great man. Truly, he was. Cut down in his prime. He would have gone on to do even greater, better things if he’d only been given the chance.’

  As he walked towards her Kate felt as if she were shrinking into herself, tensing her body as if to protect herself from some kind of approaching predator.

  ‘But you had to ruin it, didn’t you?’

  She felt a cold finger on the back of her neck. He was stroking her hair now.

  ‘Why are you grey? How old are you? Late thirties? Very young to go grey. I hope you don’t mind me asking you, but I’ve always been curious about that.’

  Kate felt acid bile rise up her oesophagus and eat into the back of her throat. She tried to swallow, but couldn’t.

  ‘You see, I feel I have some connection with you. You being grey and me not having any skin pigment. You know that, in the wild, albino animals rarely survive because they lack the pigments that provide a kind of camouflage, a disguise, for them? So I guess I’ve been lucky to get this far.’

  His hands moved around from the back of Kate’s head to her neck. She watched as his thumb moved down her throat to her clavicle and back to the side of her neck.

  ‘I can feel your pulse,’ he said. ‘It’s quite fast. I can help you slow it down a little if you like.’

  He pressed his thumb into her skin, gently at first, as he began to massage the muscles of her neck.

  ‘You seem stressed,’ he said. ‘You should try to relax more. Imagine yourself in a stress-free environment. A beach, say. Listen to the waves crash on the shore.’

  A vision of the dead baby flashed into her head.

  ‘Can you hear them? The waves?’

  He started to press harder now, with both hands, around her neck.

  Kate remembered that Gleason had killed some of his victims by asphyxiation.

  ‘Do you want to go to that other place?’ he asked gently. You are ready, aren’t you?’

  Suddenly Kate couldn’t breath. She heard herself choking. She tried to free her hands, but the more she struggled the more the rope bit into her skin. She tried to open her mouth to scream, but it was no use.

  She realised she was going to die.

  ‘You know, it’s not me doing this. I really can’t take credit for it. It’s him. And, by the way, what you said about him in that interview with the Times, that really wasn’t very nice, was it? Did nobody tell you one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead?’

  As he turned his head to look at the images of Gleason on the far wall, the door to the room smashed open. Kate turned her head to see a man framed in the doorway. He had a gun.

  The albino threw himself down to the floor, but he wasn’t quick enough. One bullet tore into his right shoulder, another into his right hand, sending a fine spray of blood onto Kate’s face and into her eyes.

  More armed men stormed into the room. They clustered around the ghost of a man on the floor, who was now whimpering in pain. One officer stood over the albino with a gun aimed at his head as another checked him for weapons.

  ‘He’s clean,’ said the cop.

  ‘Okay, cuff him.’ She recognised the voice. She blinked, but her vision was blurred.

  She felt something pull at her hands. Suddenly they were free. She looked up. There was Josh.

  ‘What the fuck were you thinking?’ he shouted.

  She shook her head, tears welling in her eyes, and tried to speak, her words muffled by the tape around her mouth. He couldn’t hear her, but it might have sounded like sorry.

  36

  Kate stared through the one-way mirror at the albino. The bandages that swathed his shoulder and hand only added to his whiteness, his ghostliness.

  Josh and another officer were in the interrogation room with him. His every word, every movement, was being recorded. As Kate watched, her eyes flitted between the action in the room and the bank of monitors that were ranged all ar
ound her. The vision of him multiplied across several screens was like some kind of technological haunting.

  ‘So let’s get this straight, Mr Walsh,’ said Josh, getting up from his chair. ‘You say you never even met Bobby Gleason?’

  ‘Gleason. The name is Gleason.’ There was something snake-like about the way he pronounced it. ‘If you want me to answer your questions you’re going to have to use my proper name.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Josh. ‘Let’s start again. Mr Gleason – you’re telling me that you never knew the late Bobby Gleason?’

  ‘That’s right, officer. Never even met him, but often wished I had.’

  ‘So you didn’t work with him as his accomplice?’

  ‘That theory of Bill Collins? A load of bull. Gleason was man enough to do what he had to do alone. Didn’t need the help of anyone. It would have been an honour to work with him, but sadly no, it never happened.’

  ‘So you are saying categorically that you didn’t help Gleason commit those crimes, those rapes and murders? You didn’t’ help with transport, and you were not involved in the kidnapping?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Did you on any occasion meet with or communicate with Teresa Collins, Frances Silla, Elizabeth Ventura, Tracey Newton or Jane Gardener?’

  ‘I know who they are, of course. And, in a way, I almost feel like I know them. But no, I’m afraid to say I never met or talked to any of them.’

  ‘So tell me about Gleason,’ said Josh, in the good cop voice he hated so much. ‘What’s the deal? Why do you dig him so?’

  ‘He was just – how I can put it? He knew what he wanted and he took it. No messing about. No worrying. No anxiety or procrastination about the rights and wrongs. He was a genius, master of his universe.’

  ‘So you admire him, is that right?’

  ‘Jesus, I love the guy. If I was forced to, he’s the one guy I would have turned queer for,’ he said, laughing.

  ‘You wanted to be him. That’s why you changed your name.’

  ‘That’s a fair assessment, I guess.’

  ‘And tell me about Dr Kate Cramer, Cassie Veringer, Jordan Weislander, Dale Hoban. How do you feel about them?’

  ‘Scum,’ he said, spitting out the word. His pale skin was covered in pink blotches now, marks of anger. ‘Fucking vermin. They deserved everything - and more. Wish I could have carried out the rest of the plan.’

  ‘Which was what?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know. You tell me.’

  ‘Let’s just say I wanted to make them suffer the way they made Gleason suffer. They took away his freedom. Can you imagine what that must have been like for a man like Gleason?’

  ‘So you intended to kidnap them? Kill them?’

  ‘Yeah, but I would have had a bit of fun with them as well.’ As he smiled he bared his sinister pink gums. ‘You know what they say about all work and no play.’

  Unable to control his anger any longer, Josh banged his fist down on the table. Shit. He was going to have to restrain himself if he was going to get through this. He took a couple of deep breaths and ran his hand over his face, beaded with perspiration.

  ‘Can you tell me what you were doing on the night of January 24 and the morning of the January 25?’

  ‘I can tell you exactly what I was doing. I was murdering a little girl by the name of Sara-Jane Gable. I didn’t realise how easy it would be. My, oh my, the carelessness of some parents. Of course it took me a while to narrow things down, you know, find single-storey houses that were easy to break into and that contained a baby. I had my top five, spread between Glendale, West Hollywood, Echo Park and Korea Town.

  ‘But that night – the night before – I was given a gift from God. I snuck up outside this one house in Los Feliz and stood outside the screen of a bedroom. The woman said she wanted to put the baby into the other room. It was only right, she said, considering. So I watched as they transferred the child into its cot across the hall. Little did they know that I had already loosened the fastening on the window. They did what they had to do and then when they fell asleep I climbed in through the window. I put my hand over the child’s mouth and took her in my car down to the sea just off the Pacific Coast Highway. I guess she must have died in the ocean.’

  The casualness of the way he told his story made Kate want to gag.

  ‘Do you want me to tell you about the others? Oh, I had great fun with the fingertips – and the tongue, the tongue, that was something else –‘

  ‘I think we’re going to take a break,’ said Josh, clenching his fists and resisting the impulse to hit this sick fuck in the head. He stormed out of the room and punched the first wall he saw instead. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ he said. By the time he had reached Kate in the surveillance room tears of pain – and anger – had formed in his eyes.

  ‘I know, I just can’t believe it,’ said Kate, walking towards him. ‘The way he talked about murdering that child – so matter of factly, so coolly.’

  ‘I had to get out of there,’ said Josh. ‘I thought I’d fucking kill him.’

  ‘So what happens now?’

  ‘What happens now is that I spend the next couple of days with this psycho listening to him tell me about how he killed that baby, how he sliced off the fingertips from a girl down in Baja and then proceeded to snuff out her life and then how he cut the tongue out of a drugged-up homeless man.’

  ‘Are you going to be alright?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll be fine,’ he said, sighing. ‘All in a day’s work. But once this is over I might just take that vacation.’

  They had always talked about going to this little island in the Caribbean together. Just twenty or so little chalets clustered around an archetypal desert island. She had first mentioned it to him when she wanted to get pregnant. Thought it would be the ideal stress-free environment in which to conceive. Of course, it had never happened. And now, well now he’d go with another woman, with Jules.

  ‘But if everything goes to plan it shouldn’t take too long,’ he said, collapsing on to a chair. ‘It all seems perfectly straightforward to me in a fucked-up kind of way. Guy idolizes dead serial killer. Takes on his identity to the extent that he even changes his fucking name. Then he sets about punishing the people who brought him to justice. We’ve got the motivation and the confession.’

  ‘What would have happened if we hadn’t found him? How far would he have gone?’

  ‘Well, after murdering two people – a child and a 19-year-old girl – I get the impression that this guy hasn’t got many scruples.’

  ‘I’m serious, Josh.’

  He took a deep breath. ‘All the way, I guess. After playing his little game I think he would have tried to have finished you off, one by one.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll say as much?’

  ‘I’ve no doubt about it.’

  ‘And that’s bound to help the case against him.’

  ‘I don’t think we need to worry about the case. It’s as strong as hell. Jordan Weislander is not going to let this one fall by the wayside.’

  He took a sip of water. ‘Hey, listen, I’d better get back in there. But I wouldn’t listen to too much more of this if I were you.’

  ‘Worried about my mental welfare?’ she said, half-joking.