Thief of Souls

by Ann Benson

  “Let me guess—the paranoids.”

  He laughed, sort of. “And the bipolars. But society still wants us to predict who’s going to crack.” He patted his hand on the folder of notes he’d accumulated in the course of our visits. “Everything that we believe will predict a serial pedophile is right here. We could have saved a lot of heartache if we’d been able to poke and prod Wilbur Durand when he was young and make the unequivocal assessment that he should be locked up for the rest of his life as a matter of public safety. But imagine the effort and cost of screening every child for predictors of later pedophilia, the hue and cry from civil-rights advocates. It’s completely impractical—we can’t round up all the guys who are fixated on child pornography because they might graduate to the next level.”

  If I was right, Wilbur Durand had graduated long before and was picking up real children and killing them. All notions of sympathy evaporated in that realization. I stood up and paced around. “There must be some barren island in the north Atlantic where we can ship them all for a while to see if it really makes a difference in the rate of pedophilia. Or some archipelago out near Siberia.”

  Doc heard the deep bitterness in my voice. “You’re more than a little frustrated with this case, aren’t you?”

  “I’m running out of time. And he’s not.”

  God bless the judge. God bless the prosecutor. The search warrant for the museum tapes was issued that afternoon.

  And Fred Vuska finally agreed to give me some help. He really had no choice, with the judge showing enough confidence in the case to officially sanction an action against the suspect. And I couldn’t search two premises by myself at the same time—the whole point was to show up, shove the warrant under someone’s nose, and toss both places before anything could be moved or hidden from either location.

  We would hit both the house and the studio at the same time. I would lead one of the teams, Escobar the other. There was no way to predict which place harbored Durand’s stocking drawer, but I couldn’t shake the notion that this was all a creative process for him and that his main place to be creative was the studio. Love and work, right? The two things that really drive people. This was a guy who combined them in an exquisitely perverted way.

  The studio was located on the far end of a back lot at Apogee Studios, well outside the route of the guided tram tour. I’d seen blurry photos of the place in a couple of tabloid spreads, which reported that black magic and occult rituals were the normal fare at the studio, along with visits from space aliens, whose pointy-headed pictures were obviously pasted in, with laughable ineptitude.

  It was all starting to sound possible to me.

  The building was a big, square, flat-roofed eyesore completely surrounded by a desert of asphalt. As it came into view, my excitement gave way to nervousness. It was so stark and barren, devoid of all welcome. There was no landscaping around this fortress, Wilbur’s kingdom, which he was certain to defend. I imagined pots of boiling oil stationed at twenty-foot intervals all along the roofline, and warriors with no faces poised and ready to spill hot death onto anyone who happened along.

  The outer offices were equally foreboding—not that Durand had to impress anyone to attract business. We’d come in through a heavy glass door, which looked to be the only entry. That surprised me; most of these studio buildings have big sliding doors, and often they’re wide open so you can see inside. But not Durand’s—it was literally encased in metal and concrete.

  We walked right in with our badges out and the warrant in hand.

  “We’re looking for Wilbur Durand,” I said.

  Cold stares from a young male assistant. “I’m sorry, but he’s not here.”

  We blew right by him; Spence was actually chuckling. He was reaching for a phone as we went through the door into the work space itself, at which point we all came to a halt.

  “Holy mother of God,” Spence said, glancing around.

  It was Disney World, a museum, a scene from Alice in Wonderland, all rolled into one. Hanging from every bit of space on the walls were masks and body doubles for all these characters we all knew. Reproductions of the heads and mangled necks of several famed actors were mounted in a display case just inside the door. Suspended from the ceilings were plastic aliens, mutilated arms, bloody-stump legs and arms.

  It was an overwhelming array of stuff, and we were going to dig through it all. Finally Spence said, “This guy must be in love with his own handiwork.”

  “I think that’s what this case is all about.”

  There were false faces everywhere, masks with transitional hair attached at the forehead and temples, meant to blend into the actor’s real hair. A headhunter’s dream. Boxes under a long counter, filled with items that you wouldn’t think anyone would bother to collect. Shoelaces, gloves, belts, and umbrellas, all beautifully organized even by my own compulsive standards—bins full of toupees and hairpieces, Harpo hair, Marilyn hair, Moe hair. I picked up one of the hanks and gave it a good long sniff—it didn’t smell like real hair, but it was definitely not the shiny vinyl stuff they use on dolls. There was bank after bank of shelving, which brought to mind a series of enormous spice racks, only the racks were loaded with makeup, hundreds of little bottles, each with a different color. And big globs of clay—I guess it was clay, it sure looked like it—on each of the tables. It could have been something like Play-Doh, from the way it smelled. He had every skin color you could imagine, in varying shades.

  We photographed everything. The search warrant didn’t specify that we could take photographs, and there have been some recent cases where unwarranted photos were disallowed as evidence, but I didn’t care. If we could use the photos in court, great; if not, so be it. At least we would have a record beyond our own memories. I was desperate not to miss anything.

  Stacks and stacks of boxes, so much stuff to wade through—I was starting to wonder if we could get through it all before Durand’s lawyer managed to pry us out of there. There was so much to see that I had to remind myself and everyone else that we were there specifically for those tapes. We could take other clearly incriminating evidence, but there were no real crimes hanging on these walls, only illusions thereof. We didn’t know what to look for, beyond the videos.

  About thirty minutes into the search, one of the other guys called me to look at a box he’d found in a closet at the back of the studio. It had been tightly taped, but when he opened it, he found it stuffed full of videotapes marked with the name of one of Durand’s movies, more cassettes than it seemed he’d need for one movie. I picked one up and read the label—it was marked with a date from the beginning of the exhibit’s run. I picked up a few more, selecting them randomly from different sections of the box—they were all within the right time frame.

  My heart felt like it would thump right out of my chest.

  I started to count them, because we would have to do an inventory of what we took out of there and because I literally couldn’t think of anything else to do with all the energy that had flooded through me. At number twenty-nine, I became aware that a new player had entered: a plaid-breeched and deeply perturbed lawyer, who’d obviously been pulled off the golf course.

  He launched into an immediate rant about how he was going to get an injunction against us using anything that we seized.

  I walked right up to him and said, quite politely, “Go right ahead.” I showed him the warrant. “We have very clear authorization to seize those security tapes and anything else that might implicate your client in a series of child disappearances.”

  He was unimpressed by my declaration of authority. “These are not security tapes,” he sneered. “Look at the markings.”

  “It’s my belief that they have been deliberately mismarked. Your client can have them back when we’re done with them, and we will be very careful not to damage them in any way, but they are warranted evidence and we are going to walk out of here with them whether you like it or not.”

  I got a cold, nasty
stare for my trouble. Out came a cell phone. The lawyer turned and walked away as he dialed.

  I wanted so badly for Wilbur Durand to come in while we were there; I wanted to see and hear this guy for myself, to get a sense of him beyond the blurry pictures. Who could it be but him on the phone with the lawyer? I made note of the time.

  I was guessing that the call would turn out to be local when we subpoenaed the phone bill.

  Even though I had what I’d wanted, I wasn’t ready to leave the studio just yet; there was something more there, I could feel it in my bones. Words from the book Doc gave me to read kept haunting me:

  There is an almost universal tendency to keep souvenirs from each victim.

  God alone knew what horrible things he might keep. Fingers, toes, ears? He had hundreds of fakes digits and limbs there, but the real ones would eventually give off a smell that we were all very good at recognizing. It might be an article of clothing or a student ID card—even elementary kids get them these days. A lock of hair, tossed in among all those wigs.

  “We need to buy some time,” I said to Spence. “I have to figure something out.”

  “We can start dumping out boxes and inventorying things as if we were going to take them.”

  “That’ll do for a little while.”

  One of the guys put the box of tapes in the back of my car. I screeched out of the parking lot and went right back to division.

  The first thing Fred said when I told him I had some tapes was “Good. Now you can get out of there.”

  “But we aren’t done yet—just on a rough count, there aren’t enough here to cover the entire time period of the exhibit. A couple of the guys are still there looking for the rest.”

  As the tapes were being carried out for me, I’d looked back at the slow-motion scene; you never saw people pull stuff out of boxes so deliberately. One ringie-dingie, two ringie-dingies, or ninety-nine bottles of beer, just paced and regular and slow. Going through the door, I instructed the others, with deliberately excessive volume, to make sure they took their time and did a thorough job of cataloging everything, in earshot of both the lawyer and the assistant. The lawyer was in outrage overdrive, screaming about the Supreme Court. Our guys were all grinning up a storm as if they were getting away with something. They were.

  In one of our utility closets there was a hand truck that we’d seized in a raid and never auctioned. I used it to bring the tapes into one of the interview rooms. While I waited for the specialized machine required to view them, I pulled out all the cassettes that roughly corresponded to the times the families had told me they’d been to the exhibit. Their memories weren’t perfect, naturally. When the machine finally arrived, I was already frazzled, but my frustration got worse, because in a couple of the cases I had to speed through several days worth of tapes to find the boy in question. They look so different in motion; all I had was still photos. But they’d all typed in their names, supposedly as part of the fun. Each time I found one I was just elated; it made it seem as if they were still alive.

  I copied off the segment for each boy so when I was finally through I had one tape with everyone. I shuddered to think what a nightmare it would be to have to notify thousands and thousands of families if we didn’t manage to stop Durand in the near future.

  “Lany.”

  I almost jumped through the ceiling. Fred was standing in the doorway of the interview room.

  “How much longer? I’m gonna catch hell on all this overtime.”

  “A couple more hours. Tops.”

  “We’re supposed to be diligent in our search practices, in case you forgot.”

  God forbid we should keep a pervert out of his work space.

  “There’s something more there, Fred, but I can’t put my finger on it yet. I just need a little more time.”

  “I got this lawyer calling me every five minutes with a new threat.”

  What could I say? “I’m sorry, Fred, we’re going as fast as we can over there.”

  Clearly dissatisfied, he left me alone with my best hope—the tapes themselves. I knew that if I sat down and just watched the loop of what I’d copied out, something would jump out at me. I viewed it over and over and over again.

  Escobar was back from the house.

  “Anything?”

  “Nada.”

  “Hey, do you have a couple of minutes?” I asked.

  “It usually takes me longer than that.”

  I laughed. “I’ll keep that in mind. Could you just look at these tapes and tell me what you see?”

  He sat and watched. “They’re all blond,” he said.

  “I figured that out already.”

  “They’re all young.”

  “I got that too.”

  “They all look like really nice kids.”

  Innocence, we decided together, was the attracting factor.

  “Doesn’t have much evidentiary value,” Escobar said.

  He was right. I could already imagine what Doc would say, that these qualities represented everything the abductor would like to have been and that, in his own eyes, he was the original victim—a sweet little boy who got hurt over and over again. He would be angry about having his childhood stolen, about having his own innocence destroyed, to the point that he made it his personal mission to make sure he would not be the only little boy to whom it happened. Wilbur himself was well past the age where the scars and bruises of childhood could simply be cast off to clear the way for that precious state of mind. He recognized the trusting quality in each of his victims and tried to acquire it for himself.

  But that conclusion wasn’t going to get me an arrest warrant. Neither would anything that they’d found in the house. No lawyers there, but Escobar went on and on about a very annoying houseboy who’d trailed them around from one room to the next, gesticulating wildly and swearing in some foreign language over the mess they were making.

  “He went ballistic over the things that were left around,” Escobar said. “But this toss was a lot cleaner than most because there just wasn’t all that much to toss—everything was positioned like it meant something. It was a mess compared to what it was when we started. And this houseboy got crazy about it.”

  The lack of a lawyer was one of those glaring omissions that just shouted to be noticed. Why not send a lawyer to both places if he had nothing to hide in either? A guy like Wil Durand would have a lawyer with underlings available. So the fact that he didn’t dispatch one to his house while it was being searched had to mean that he had nothing there to cover.

  The pretoss Polaroids showed clearly that Escobar was right—the place was as spare as a shrine, the enclave of a high-intensity control freak. The master bedroom was the most unwelcoming place I’ve ever seen. The bed was all ebony, very dark, with no ornamentation of any kind on the headboard or footboard. Probably cost as much as my car. There were bed stands, but there was almost nothing on either of them, just these little sculptures or whatever—I don’t really know what to call them—they looked like some kind of Buddhist meditation rock things. Useless except to be dusted. On my bed stand I have books and moisture cream and a glass of water, K-Y in case I get lucky, all sorts of other stuff.

  But what really got me was what he had on the wall above the bed—a print for his movie They Eat Small Children There.

  “Where was the casket?”

  Escobar didn’t get it.

  “The one he probably sleeps in,” I said.

  Escobar rose up, grumbling. “You’re starting to come apart. Time to leave.”

  I went back to the Polaroids of the studio. The wreckage of innocence was visible everywhere in the artificial body parts and fluids, the plastic but real-looking swords and knives, the jolting vinyl wounds with muscle and sinew and putrefaction, so perfectly formed and painted. I tried to superimpose the images from the photographs with the images on the tapes. And then I superimposed all that on what I remembered of the kids’ rooms.

  It was there, so close, I cou
ld almost touch it.

  Whatever it was.

  I found Spence at his desk. “I need to go back to the studio right now. I just need to look at everything again.”

  He didn’t question me. “I’ll drive,” he said. We were almost through the door when my pager went off.

  Oh, yes—I had children, who needed to be fed, driven, and comforted on occasion. In all of this craziness, I had almost forgotten. “What now,” I said, “did Evan forget his shin pads again?”

  Not this time. It was the desk sergeant. I had a visitor.

  twenty-three

  Those who cheat death by living to extreme old age often take on mythical status, whether or not such reverence is merited by noteworthy character or accomplishments—we know of one woman from Saint-Etienne who managed to see one hundred two springs; she was mean-spirited and rather slow, a veritable shrew in her middle years, yet people would travel from very long distances to touch her, in the hope of absorbing some of her longevity. If Madame Catherine Karle had reached that milestone, we surely would have heard of it, for she was a truly remarkable woman. It was said by those who knew her at Champtocé that she could work miracles with rocks and stones and a handful of dirt, and I could find no reason to disbelieve any of it.

  Her son Guillaume was a good strong man with a kind and understanding nature, one who would have been the best of husbands had he married. It always seemed to me that he ought to have occupied a higher station; there was something about him that set him apart from the rest of us. He kept to himself but had no airs of snobbery; nevertheless, there was an indefinable quality of “highness” about him, a regency of carriage that could not be overlooked. It was expressed in good works and deeds, of which I myself was once the beneficiary. Toward the very end of my husband’s ordeal, when I could not manage to roll him over, Guillaume was always willing to lend his strong arms and his good heart to the task of caring for a dying man.