by Dan Wells
Withered bodies collapse into ash when they die, so there was no decaying body for anyone to smell and get suspicious. We hadn’t reported his death, so unless his boss called the landlord, it was unlikely anyone here would realize he was gone until the rent came due at the end of the month. I looked at the big basset hound, then back at Christina. “I haven’t seen him.”
She tugged on the basset hound’s leash, dragging the heavy dog forward a few inches. “He left his dog with me yesterday and hasn’t come back. I can’t keep him anymore and I don’t want him just running around the complex pooping on everything.” She tugged the leash again, pulling the dog closer to my doorway. “I suppose we could call the pound, but I don’t really know how that works—I don’t know if he could get the dog back when he shows up again, or if they’d sell him to somebody, or God forbid they put him to sleep.” She tugged again. “Can you watch him?”
“The dog?”
“Yes.” Tug. “I’ve seen you take care of him before, maybe he’ll be better for you. It will only be a day or two, I’m sure.”
I have rules about animals: I don’t own them, I don’t touch them, I don’t even talk to them. I’d watched Boy Dog for an hour or two, twice, so that I could get closer to Cody French and kill him. Now that he was dead I needed to stay as far away as I could. Especially now that I had Potash in the house—adding a dog to the equation would be idiotic. Worst of all, despite Christina’s uninformed promise, I knew that French wasn’t coming back. If I took this dog, it would be forever. It would be stupid and irresponsible.
I started to form a protest, stepping slightly to the side to give Christina a better view of how little space I had, but she seemed to interpret the move as an invitation to let go of the leash. Boy Dog wandered in, walked straight to Potash’s makeshift bedroll, and peed on the blankets. Potash muttered a low curse, and I turned back to Christina.
“I’ll take him.”
* * *
I gathered my papers and retreated to my bedroom, shutting the door to study and letting Potash deal with Boy Dog. He wasn’t exactly a difficult dog—he was a basset hound, which is barely one step up from a furry statue. Give him a warm place to lie down and he’d lie there for hours without moving. The fact that he had claimed Potash’s bed gave me a petty sense of satisfaction, and I turned my attention to Mary Gardner.
I pored through my own notes, assembled over weeks of part-time volunteer work on Mary’s floor of the hospital. She lived under the human guise of a nurse, forty-six years old, competent and caring and boundlessly sympathetic to the parents of those children who died in her care. She was very careful about her kills—we had to give her that. If not for Brooke’s assurance, we would never have suspected that the children under Mary’s care had died from anything other than the diseases they were already being treated for. Many of her victims, we suspected, weren’t under her direct care at all, though we’d been observing the hospital long enough to tie her, at least superficially, to the approximate time and place of most of the deaths on three floors of the building. If she were human, we’d have enough evidence to at least get her fired, but we couldn’t afford that with a Withered. Drive her away and she’d just start killing somewhere else, and we didn’t have the time or the resources to follow her all over the world. We had to kill her here, once and for all, and the sooner we could manage it, the fewer children she’d take with her on the way out. Our own danger from Meshara was a secondary concern for now, though as Trujillo had pointed out, every dead Withered made us that much safer.
The one thing we hadn’t figured out was the actual mechanism of Mary’s kills; she seemed to gain some kind of healing boost from the process, as her cycles of health and illness seemed to follow the deaths fairly clearly, but she was never around when the victims died. My best guess at this point was a delayed reaction: she’d slip into a sick child’s room, “take” something from them—hell if I knew what it was, energy or something—and then her health would improve, and then the child would die, sometimes hours later, sometimes a day or more.
Ostler and the others insisted that Mary’s killing of children made her more evil than the others, more heinous and irredeemable. I figured a victim was a victim; she didn’t target children out of generic evilness, but because something about her process required it. Finding out what that something was could be the key to the whole mystery.
I needed someone to talk to, to bounce ideas off of. Kelly was good for this, and sometimes Trujillo, though he talked back too much to be of any real use as a sounding board. Either way, they were both working on their own branches of the project tonight, and I had to make do without them. In the old days I’d had Max, and then I’d used Marci, but I supposed I’d be paying for that mistake for the rest of my life. I couldn’t use just anyone … and I guessed, at the moment, I couldn’t use anyone at all.
I haven’t told you about Marci yet, though I’ve mentioned her a couple of times. She’s not exactly easy to talk about. Sociopathy is a tricky disease to describe—it’s not an absence of emotion, but an absence of empathy. You look at another human being, or even an animal, and feel no connection whatsoever: you don’t feel good when they’re happy, you don’t feel bad when they get hurt, you’re completely cut off. Maybe you feel jealous when they get something you want, but that’s not a connection to them—that’s all focused on yourself. What you want and what you’re willing to do to get it. And if that means hurting someone, well, you don’t care. Your needs are more important than anyone else’s, because you’re more important than anyone else. Nobody else counts.
Marci was different.
And now Marci was dead.
I looked around at my room, almost as if I expected to see her there, pale and half formed, like a shadow in reverse. I don’t know what a ghost looks like, or if ghosts are even real—the Withered are, so who knows what else is possible?
“Are you here?” I whispered. Instantly I felt the tears in the corners of my eyes, hot and cold at the same time, my face burning with anger and embarrassment. I shouldn’t try to talk to her. I know she’s not there. But if anyone could be, if there really was something after this—maybe another life, or even just a dead reflection of this one—I wanted her to be there. I wanted her to be here.
I dried my eyes, rubbing them harshly with the palms of my hands. Marci was gone, and I couldn’t change that. Worse, she was gone because I hadn’t stopped her killer fast enough. I wasn’t going to make that mistake again. I’d follow this new demon straight into hell before I let it kill anyone I knew.
I couldn’t turn to Potash for help—if he didn’t take me seriously, how seriously would he take the discussion? I’d have to work on my own.
The central question of criminal profiling is this: what does the killer do that he doesn’t have to do? Find that, and you find everything. As much as the average person wouldn’t believe it, serial killers have very clear, often very simple reasons for what they do—reasons you probably disagree with if you’re not a killer, but a bad reason is still a reason, and the reasons we do things affect the way that we do them. Imagine you’re closing a door: why are you closing it? If you’re leaving your house to go to school or to work, you probably close the door firmly behind you and make sure it’s locked before you go. If you’re sneaking out at night, you probably close it softly and slowly, doing everything as quietly as you can so nobody hears. If you’re leaving because you just had an argument, you might slam the door behind you and walk away without looking to see if it stayed closed. All you really have to do is close the door, but the way you close it says everything. Killing is the same. The way you choose your victim, isolate it, kill it, even the way you leave the body—whether you arrange it like killers in the movies, or just run away and hope nobody sees you. These choices, even if they’re subconscious, can tell investigators even more about you than your fingerprints.
The Withered, though they kill for different reasons, still have reasons. Crowley
stole body parts from his victims, and while a normal serial killer might do that as a way of remembering the kill, Crowley did it because he was rebuilding his body. It was supernatural, and impossible to decipher in the beginning, but it still helped me to figure him out. It still helped me to kill him.
Mary killed children, exclusively. She killed remotely, or on a delay. I got out a clean sheet of paper, hoping that the process of taking notes could substitute for a human sounding board, and wrote down everything I knew about her methods. She got to know some of her victims before she killed them, but not all. Was that a crucial part of the process? Did it affect the outcome? Maybe that was why she worked as a nurse: because she needed prolonged contact to make it happen. Whatever “it” was. If all she needed was the occasional sick child, she could get the same access as a janitor or even a volunteer who visited once a week. And yet she was a nurse. Why?
I looked through my stack of papers for her timeline. Ostler had bought me a laptop to work on and sent all of these documents through e-mail, but I hated that machine. Living on my own, with no one breathing down my neck or checking my Internet history, I’d spent nearly a week binge-watching every horrible thing I could find—entire message boards and websites about death, displaying the most graphic images and even videos of head wounds, shark bites, gunshots, and more. I’d nearly lost control then, and I’d even fallen back on my old habits and started a Dumpster fire or two, on the far side of town where no one would link it to me. Nothing serious, just a little safety valve to release the pressure that was building up inside of me, pouring it out in a burst of flame and heat and dancing red—
No. Stay focused. Push it away.
I have a job to do.
I looked at the printout of our reconstructed timeline. Mary didn’t seem to kill on any predictable schedule: sometimes one a month, sometimes more, sometimes less. Two of her kills were less than a week apart. Kelly was convinced this meant there were more we didn’t know about, but I doubted it. If two per week was Mary’s standard schedule, and we just didn’t know about the others, where were they? How could she kill that many people and keep them hidden? Fort Bruce simply wasn’t big enough. The hospital was the most advanced in the region, and people came in from all over hoping to get the best care they could. That created a large enough population for Mary to hide her activities. Obviously it was possible that some of the kills we attributed to her were not, and some of the kills we thought were unrelated were actually hers, but even if we gave her credit for every dead child in the hospital, it didn’t add up to the frequency Kelly suggested.
But that left us with the original problem: why the erratic schedule? She seemed to kill for health reasons, like Crowley had—rejuvenating themselves every time their bodies got too degraded to function properly—but Crowley had followed a predictable pattern. When his kills got closer together, it was because his degeneration was accelerating. Mary’s pace seemed to speed up and slow down almost at random. There had to be an explanation, and if Kelly’s was wrong, what was right?
The bedroom door opened abruptly, and Potash dragged Boy Dog in from the hall with a grunt. “He’s staying in your room.”
“I can’t have him in here,” I said, practically jumping up. “I have rules—”
Potash growled. “You said yes to him, you deal with him.”
“I have rules,” I said again, though I knew it would mean nothing to Potash. I stared at Boy Dog, panting placidly on the floor, then looked up at Potash. “We’ll give him back.”
“She won’t take him back.”
“Then we’ll…” I hesitated, knowing that anything I said would put the dog in danger. Put him out on the street? Leave him tied to someone else’s door? Send him to a pound? My rule said to avoid animals, but the purpose behind it was to protect them. I couldn’t let myself hurt an animal, even through inaction. I’d hurt too many people that way already.
“I’ll call the animal shelter,” said Potash, “but you keep him in here until they come.”
“Wait,” I said. “We have to give him to someone who wants him.”
For the first time, his facade cracked and he stared at me in a grimace of complete confusion. “Why?”
“Because I won’t let him get hurt.”
“The shelter won’t hurt him.”
“But they won’t help him either,” I said. “I have rules.”
He stared at the dog a minute. “So what do you want to do?”
I want to hit this dog with the sharp edge of a shovel until I can’t recognize it anymore. I closed my eyes and breathed. “I want to put an ad in the … I don’t know. No one reads the paper, and I don’t use the Internet. Craigslist? Is that a thing?”
“Yes, that’s a thing. You don’t have your laptop?”
“I leave it at work.”
“That’s not the point of a laptop.”
“Do you have one?” I asked. “Or a phone?”
“Not a smartphone.” He stepped backward into the hall. “We’ll post an ad tomorrow. I’m closing this so he can’t get back out.”
“Okay—” I started, but he shut the door, and I heard his footsteps walk away. I looked at the dog. “Hey.”
It didn’t respond.
“I don’t want to hurt you, okay?” I’d had him here before, and he’d been fine. It was only a few hours, though, and this would be all night. I sat back down, watching Boy Dog like I expected him to attack, or turn into a bowl of flowers. He looked back, mouth open, panting softly. “How’d you get your name?” I asked. “Why Boy Dog, instead of … anything else in the entire world? Everybody has a reason.”
What did Mary Gardner do that she didn’t have to do?
4
I caught Agent Ostler in the lobby of the building where we rented an office. “Children are weak.”
She looked at me a moment. “Is this something you need to talk to Dr. Trujillo about?”
“No,” I said, “it’s about Mary Gardner. She targets children because they’re weak. She needs somebody weak.”
“She kills the terminally ill; they’re all weak.”
“But children are weaker,” I said. “Not just physically, but their immune systems. They haven’t been exposed to as many diseases as adults, so they haven’t built up the antibodies to fight them off. Children recover from disease more quickly because they’re resilient, but they’re also far more likely to get sick in the first place. That’s how she does it.”
Ostler started walking again, forcing me to hurry to catch up. “Are you suggesting that she’s the one putting these children in the hospital in the first place? That would mean contacting them months or even years before they die; we have no evidence for that kind of behavior.”
“That’s not what I’m saying at all,” I said, following her into the elevator. “I’m saying we have it backwards. We thought she was taking something from the children, whether it was their health or their healing power or whatever, which is why she gets healthy and they die. But why does it have to be so complicated? How do you take ‘healing power’ from someone? It doesn’t make sense.”
“None of it makes sense,” said Ostler. “They’re supernatural creatures who don’t follow any rules.”
“But they do,” I said. “They always do, whether we understand those rules or not. And the simpler answer is always the best. Mary Gardner isn’t stealing some kind of healing power, she’s targeting already-sick children and giving them her own illnesses.”
Ostler turned to me, paying real attention for the first time that morning. “That would mean…”
“It explains everything,” I said. The elevator stopped on our floor, and we stepped into the hall. Potash was already there, telling the same thing to Kelly, but they stopped to listen to me. “It explains why she targets kids,” I continued, “because it’s easier to give them her sickness. It explains why the deaths all appear to be natural causes—because they are natural causes, just like any other disease. It explains w
hy they die on such a weird schedule—because she’s not the one killing them. She’s just giving them a disease and then that kills them.”
“But the timing is too close—the correlation between her health and their deaths is too close to be random,” said Ostler. “There might be a variance of a few days, but that doesn’t account for some of the seven-week gaps we’ve seen in the timeline.”
“This theory explains that, too,” I said. “The Withered are defined by what they lack, and we know from Brooke that Mary Gardner lacks health. We thought she had to steal it from other people, but then why steal health from sick children? That’s like … eating gum off the bottom of a table: it might help a little, but it’s the most inefficient way of getting the job done. Our problem is we didn’t think it through: if she doesn’t have any health, what is she going to do? Think about it. What’s going to happen to her all the time?”
Ostler closed her eyes, in an expression that said she felt as stupid as I did when I finally figured it out. “She’s going to get sick.”
“Exactly,” I said. “We were so worried about the gun in those photos, we didn’t pay attention to the real clue: she’s wearing a paper face mask in almost all of them, even at home. If she has no health of her own she’s going to get sick all the time. She wears a face mask and slathers herself in hand sanitizer and does every other precaution she can think of, but sooner or later she’s going to catch something and it’s going to hit her hard. A cold could kill her. Those seven-week gaps are just the times she caught an innocuous disease that wasn’t lethal to anyone else when she gave it away.”
“Then why does she work in a hospital?” asked Ostler. “She’d be exposed to all kinds of pathogens in there.”
I nodded. “But she’d be able to dump them off immediately, without arousing any suspicion. A hospital is dangerous to her, but it’s also the only place she can live without showing up on every epidemic tracking program there is. She’s trapped in a feedback loop, always getting sick and always getting better. She couldn’t leave the hospital if she wanted to.”
