Choice of Evil b-11

by Andrew Vachss

  “Very well,” I told her, not wishing to cause her any distress when she would be alone for so long.

  She made an omelet with several different ingredients. I didn’t watch her closely, preferring to be surprised. It was excellent, despite the pale color and altered texture.

  “What did you put in this, Zoë?”

  “Cream cheese and red peppers.”

  “Well, you’ve done it again. This is quite astounding.”

  “You won’t forget, will you?”

  “Forget what?”

  “What you’re going to get. When you’re out?”

  “A deck of playing cards,” I told her. “And some fresh bread, if I can find it.”

  “You *did* remember.”

  “It wasn’t a very complex task,” I told her. “Why would you expect me to. . .”

  “People forget stuff,” she said, dismissively.

  “My memory is flawless,” I responded.

  “I wasn’t. . . Never mind.”

  Not wishing to evoke another tantrum, I did not pursue the matter. After testing the security of the restraints, I said goodbye to Zoë and left the hideout from the first floor.

  The drive was uneventful, as I had hoped. The radio had nothing about the kidnapping, despite my enduring its repetitive blather for the entire trip. I was fortunate enough to locate a spot in the short-term parking lot, the advantage being the coin-operated meters as opposed to a human being who filled the same role in the larger lot. The rates were near-extortionate, but a full hour was permitted, so there was no risk of an identifying ticket from one of the uniformed drones eagerly circling awaiting just such an opportunity.

  The young woman at the airport concession counter rang up my innocuous purchases: People magazine, a lurid-covered paperback book, a deck of playing cards, and, of course, USA Today. I made certain that, upon inquiry, she would not recall a man matching my “description” as having purchased only the newspaper. She pulled a receipt from the cash register and handed it to me along with my change, never making eye contact. I placed them in my carry-on bag, a round-trip ticket to a nearby city in my inside breast pocket against the unlikely chance of being asked to produce a reason for my presence.

  The airport did, indeed, feature a bakery. I purchased three loaves of French bread, then made my way out of the terminal toward where a group of people had gathered to smoke. I had a pack of cigarettes in my pocket, opened with several missing, in preparation. It was not at all uncommon for ticketed passengers to wait outside until the last moment in order to ingest as much nicotine as possible in the fresh air (the contradiction apparently lost upon them) to fortify them for the coming deprivation. However, once certain I was not being shadowed, I simply proceeded across the various walkways until I reached my car. I left the airport as undetected as I had entered.

  As an act of self-discipline, I did not examine the newspaper until I re-entered the basement. The child looked up when I entered, her artwork spread in front of her, classical music of some kind playing on the radio.

  “Hi!” she said brightly.

  “Hello, Zoë.”

  “Did you get—?”

  “Of course,” I assured her, pulling out the deck of cards and the French bread.

  “No, I meant. . . did you get the paper?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did they—?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I told her. “Let’s see.”

  Apparently, the child took that statement as an invitation (although it was not so intended, I could not fault her for taking the words literally) and perched herself on the arm of the chair I was occupying as I searched for the appropriate section.

  The response was there. Precisely as instructed. I pointed it out to Zoë.

  “Does that mean they’ll buy me back?” she asked.

  “It would appear so,” I replied. “But it may be a ploy of some kind.”

  “What’s a ploy?”

  “A ruse. A. . . trick.”

  “Oh. How will you know?”

  “There are stages to these operations. As we progress, the truth will emerge.”

  “But you are going to ask them for money, right?”

  “Certainly. That is the whole purpose.”

  “Do you have a lot of money?”

  “I. . . don’t know, child. I suppose that would depend on what ‘a lot’ means to you.”

  “Do you have a million dollars?”

  “Yes,” I told her truthfully. “I have considerably more than that, in fact.”

  “Oh.”

  She was silent after that, getting up and going back to her drawing. After some time passed, I realized that I had been puzzling over her reaction to my last statement. A logic gap was apparent, but the sequence eluded me.

  “Zoë,” I asked, “weren’t you surprised?”

  “At what?”

  “When I told you I had so much money.”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, weren’t you surprised that I would do something like this for money when I already had so much?”

  “No. My father has a lot of money too. Millions and millions. And he always wants more.”

  “Ah. But, you understand, child, I don’t do this for the money. Do you know why I do it?”

  “Because you’re a connoisseur, right?”

  I was stunned. There was not a trace of sarcasm in the child’s statement. Yet how could she. . .? I quickly recovered, and asked her: “Why do you say that, Zoë?”

  “Well, because of what you said. Before. Remember? You said you could be a connoisseur of. . . something, right? And also *do* it too. Like my drawing.”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, what you do, it’s like. . . acting, right? And other people do it, but they don’t all do it the same.”

  “How do you mean, other people do it?”

  “Kidnapping. It happens all the time. On TV, you see it. My father talks about it sometimes.”

  “About you being kidnapped?”

  “No, about other kids. What he saw on TV.”

  “I see. And you think I do this because it’s my. . . art? Like what you do?”

  “Sure.”

  “But your drawing, it’s designed for. . . display, isn’t it? You want other people to see what you did?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “All right, sometimes. But nobody will ever see what I do.”

  “Yes they *will*. They just won’t know it was you. Like a painting on a wall.”

  “But artists sign their paintings.”

  “I don’t sign mine.”

  “Ever?”

  “Never. I never sign mine. They tried to make me. In school. But I wouldn’t do it.”

  “Still, they would know it was you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If they displayed different drawings that the whole class did, wouldn’t everybody know which one was yours?”

  “Yes. But only in the class. If you put my drawings up in another place, nobody would know it was me.”

  “But they could still admire them, couldn’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then—”

  “That’s like you,” she interrupted. “You don’t sign your. . . stuff either. Or you’d go to jail. You can’t sign it. But people see it. And you know it was you.”

  That evening, I began to teach her how to play chess.

  I knew what was coming next. Looked around. Xyla wasn’t there. I called her name and she came running just in time for the next question to come up:

  >>Where’s Candy?<<

  I couldn’t figure out if he was testing or really asking, but it didn’t matter, the answer was the same.

  dead

  Luther Allison’s “Cherry Red Wine” was searing out of the Plymouth’s speakers as I drove back. About an unfaithful woman who drank so much wine that the earth around her grave turned the same color. I wondered what color the dirt would be around wherever they’d put Ca
ndy. Whatever color human hearts are, I guess. Ripped-out human hearts, sold to the highest bidder.

  I’d given the maniac her name earlier on. And two more: Train and Julio. It’d be easy enough for him to find out who Train was. Who he’d been, anyway: the leader of a baby-breeder cult. There was a contract out on him, and Wesley was holding the paper. But Candy came into it. Hard Candy. She went back with me and Wesley. All the way back. I hadn’t seen her in years, didn’t recognize her when I met her again—all that plastic surgery. But when she took off her contacts to show me those yellow eyes, when she told me things that nobody but she could have known, I believed her. Candy was in business for herself by then. I can’t think of a name to call her, but she sold sex. Packaged it, any way you wanted. Train had her daughter, and she wanted the kid back. I. . . got into it.

  All of this happened around the same time. And it was more connected than I’d ever nightmared. Train and Candy were partners. Her daughter was a toy. And Candy thought I’d be her tool.

  It didn’t work out like that. First, Wesley warned me off Train. Later, we ended up trading targets. I took Train. Julio too. Wesley did mine, then claimed them all in his suicide note.

  But not Candy. When we were all kids, when all of us were doing wrong, all building sins, Wesley was magnetic north on her compass. He never knew. I don’t think it would have made any difference to him. Wesley was too lethal to mate; never had a real partner. And Candy. . . she worshipped the ice in Wesley just as I did. But it penetrated her. Took her.

  Citizens would say there was no difference between them, but they’d be missing it. Wesley was walking homicide, but he never did it for fun. It was fun for Candy, all of it. Even selling her own daughter to freaks, and chumping me into getting the kid back after she’d been paid for the merchandise.

  I’ve got enough regret in me for the things I’ve done in my life to fill a chasm. But Candy. . . killing Candy. . . that wasn’t one of them.

  Wesley died never knowing what happened to her. But now my secret was shared. With a. . .

  “He’s crazy, baby,” Michelle said. “You can’t make sense out of crazy. You’ll just make yourself crazy trying.”

  “He’s not crazy.”

  “Burke! Listen to yourself. That stuff you told me. The ‘messages’ he’s sending you. He kidnaps kids and kills them. That’s his ‘art.’ He’s foaming at the mouth, sweetie. If the people running around making a hero out of him knew. . .”

  “Michelle, there hasn’t been one murder since he started. . .”

  “Started. . . what?”

  “These messages. To me. It’s like. . . those murders were all some kind of. . . You know how you have to prove?”

  She knew what I meant by the word. Had to do it herself too many times on the street not to. “Sure,” she said.

  “Credentials,” I said, finally finding the word I was looking for—the word that kept echoing through all of this. “He’s the real thing. I just can’t see what he wants.”

  “Wesley,” she said softly.

  “Wesley’s—”

  “—dead. Sure. But that’s what all his little crazy ‘tolls’ are about, right?”

  “Tolls?”

  “The price, honey. Like stud poker. You have to pay to see his next card. Every time, isn’t that true?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, then, that’s the link,” she said, like she was telling me it was Monday, so certain.

  “No, it isn’t,” I said, all of a sudden getting it. “I am.”

  “Xyla around?” I asked Trixie.

  “She was. But she had to. . . do something. Said she’d be back in a couple of minutes. You don’t mind waiting, right?”

  “Not at all.” I don’t know why, but there was no sense of urgency in me. I knew the killer’s next message was somewhere in that computer, just waiting for Xyla to open it up. But I wasn’t in any hurry to see it.

  “Crystal Beth was my sister,” Trixie said, snapping me out of wherever I’d gone to.

  I just looked at her, waiting.

  “This. . . guy. The one Xyla got you to. You think he killed them?”

  “Who?”

  “Whoever killed Crystal Beth. He kills fag-bashers, right?”

  “Yeah. There’s no guarantee he’ll ever get the right ones. He hits at random.”

  “So why do you want him?” she asked, stepping closer to me. A shadow changed behind her. Rusty. The big guy who was always drawing. He didn’t say a word, just bowed slightly. I returned it. And finally got it—I’d have to say the right thing to this woman if I wanted Xyla to open another message.

  “Some people. . . some gay people. . . they hired me to reach out to him. See if he needed any help. Getting away, I mean.”

  “And you were willing to do that?”

  “I’m trying to find whoever killed Crystal Beth,” I told her. “And maybe he’s the path.”

  “Yeah. Okay. I mean, I’m no serial-killer groupie but. . . I mean, it’s not like he’s killing kids or anything. Everyone knows how you’d feel about that.”

  Her face was a study in repose, brown eyes alive but calm. And right then I knew. Xyla was slicker than the killer thought. And, somehow, she’d read his damn messages too.

  I didn’t say anything.

  Xyla swept into the room. Trixie and Rusty backed away.

  “Ready to have your look?” Xyla asked, so upbeat and innocent.

  “Sure,” I told her.

  The following morning, it was time for the next phase of the operation. Again telling Zoë that I would be making a call from outside, I simply went upstairs and activated the staged sequence in the computer with the “contact-target” command. Within minutes, a call would be placed to the subject’s home. Whether picked up by an answering machine or a person, I was reasonably confident that it would be recorded. The digitized paste-up was ready to send, one of a menu of choices available to me telephonically via button-sequence selection. As the target had indicated compliance via the newspaper ad, I was able to proceed to the next step without the annoying game-playing that sometimes results when the target’s response is placed other than as precisely directed.

  When the phone was answered at the target’s home, the following message would come across the line:

  Thank you for your cooperation. If you wish proof of the child’s health and safety, please so indicate by affixing a piece of *red* material to the flagpole in front of your residence. This may be an object of clothing, a scrap of cloth. . . anything at all, so long as it is unmistakably red. As soon as we observe this, we will prepare and transmit the appropriate proof.

  There is an element of bluff—and, thus, of chance—in all operations. Requiring the target to attach a piece of red material to the flagpole in front of their house is a classic example. Certainly, I was aware of the flagpole. Now was the time to balance the value of instilling the belief that they were under constant observation against the risk of revealing the somewhat mechanized nature of my contact systems. Restated: I would necessarily assume that they would, indeed, attach the red material, and act as if that were a fact. If I was correct in my assumption, it would exacerbate their sense of being under observation. . . and increase my safety by decreasing their willingness to participate in any law-enforcement exercise designed to ensnare me. However, if they refused (or were unable) to attach the material and I sent the promised proof anyway, it would surely disclose that they were *not* under active surveillance, threatening the credibility of my entire presentation to date.

  Although not given to introspection, I do understand that my exercises contain an element not purely intellectual. That is, the intellectual portion is *reduction* of risk. But were I able to eliminate *all* risk, my art would be truly completed and any repetition thereof utterly banal and meaningless. Were I ever to achieve perfection, I would cease at the apex.

  Downstairs again, I found the child wearing some sort of coveralls, busily engaged in cleaning the kitc
hen area.

  “Did you call them?” she asked by way of greeting.

  “I did.”

  “Did they say anything?”

  “I would have no way of knowing, child. It was a one-way conversation. Remember? I explained how it worked.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know you did that for all the. . . phone calls. Just maybe for the first one.”

  “No. In fact, I will never actually speak to. . . the people.”

  “What people?”

  “Whoever your parents designate to act for them. Sometimes, the parents have. . . difficulty in dealing with the emotional stress of the situation, and they have others act for them.”

  “Like the police?”

  “That is the most likely.”

  “My father won’t do that,” the child said. Not smugly, but with clear assurance.

  I did not pursue the matter. Although the child seemed far too clever to be deceived about her father’s actual occupation—he is listed as the owner of a waste-removal firm in the business directory—there was no point in providing her with the information known to me.