by David Levien
Finally, he came upon the last picture in the pile, and it was slightly different from the rest. In it, reflected from a mirror that had been placed on the floor beneath an intact naked female, who was hanging from the hooks by her hands, blood running down her thighs, was Abler himself, wearing only a too-small leather jacket. Hers, he guessed. Erect and drooling, the camera dangling by a strap around his neck. Finally, Behr got a good look at the man with neither cap nor toupee on his head, bald and strange, with his drawn-on eyebrows. Behr couldn’t identify the victim because of a black hood over her head, sprigs of blond hair protruding from the bottom.
He finished with the pictures, and felt his breath come heavy with dread as he looked over at a refrigerator and practically staggered toward it. His hands sweating inside his latex gloves, he reached for the handle and peeled the door open. The clean light from the bulb inside glowed with menace, and when he saw what the refrigerator held, it caused his legs to go weak.
71
Being back on the stalk is rocket fuel in his veins.
The red Mazda 6 is parked in her driveway across from where he sits. Rushing back inside the office, he’d squared away some of what he’d been working on before grabbing his keys and heading out for the address he’d pulled from her personnel file. He can see Stacie inside now, moving around in the living room, dressed in tight exercise clothes, following along with some workout program on the television.
He wonders for a moment if he is working too quickly. There is always the danger of the work losing its meaning if there are too many projects, if there isn’t sufficient contemplation and appreciation in between. But no, he’s in a groove. He’s born to do this, every nerve fiber in his being firing in concert. It will be refreshing to act right away, without undue contemplation and struggle with his urges. His work space is empty and practically calling for a new subject. He thinks of the blue plastic OfficeMax boxes that he’d strapped with cinder blocks and then lugged out to the quarry’s edge down at White Rock, where he’d finally dropped his failed work, one, two, three, into the black depths where it belonged. Nestled inside the last box, something that would confuse the hell out of whoever might find it, as unlikely as that occurrence would ever be—an extra pair of hands. Quinn’s. He wondered if they had clapped on the way down. The oxy torch was last to go in, the final piece of an abortive chapter, but now the future is filled with promise.
The night unfolds in his mind: the surprise on Stacie’s sweat-shining face as Hardy from the office appears at her door with a folder in his hand and a story about something that needs to be looked over and signed off on.
“Why don’t you come on in?” she offers.
And then the knowing in her eyes in the moment before he takes her. The scent of her hair. The feel of her skin. Her cries of terror. The bite of the rope as he secures her. Then, back in his space, the recognizable parts of her personality will come apart as she’s reduced to a delirium of pain and suffering. Finally, she’ll emit the uncontrollable scream of existence, which he’ll capture in his mind and with his camera for all eternity. And afterward, the deep black satisfied sleep will come.
Stacie looks like she’s in for the night. Either way it seems the workout will go on for a while, and if she does decide to head out when she’s done, she’ll likely shower and primp and that will take plenty of time. It is a ten-minute trip home to get his kit. Or he can just go and do it and improvise. It’s just a simple question of one trip or two. He can practically feel his hands in her blood …
72
Close it, Behr urged himself, but for the moment he could not. The stark light and cold air from inside the refrigerator spilled out onto him. Upon the shelves were jars and lidded glass containers of all sizes and shape, and inside of them floating in brine or vinegar or some other preservative were indeterminate body parts. On the bottom shelf, in a large glass bowl, suspended in clear liquid, were what appeared to be several vaginas.
Behr’s very being shuddered at the horror of what he’d found, at the fact that he had been correct about Abler, and at the quandary in which he’d put himself. He had at once made a case and doomed it, due to the illegal entry. If he called the police now, everything inside the garage, every shred of evidence against this monster, would be inadmissible. A pang of sorrow shot through him for what he still owed Kerry Gibbons, and her daughter, Kendra, for that matter.
Close it up and get out, he told himself. Fall back and drum up some concrete evidence to justify a search warrant, or find another way to stunt up a reason for the cops to get inside legitimately. Before it was too late and Abler killed again or sniffed out that someone had been inside his place and scrubbed it and vanished into thin air. Of course there was always the chance, supposing Behr managed to get him arrested, that Abler could successfully claim insanity—the pictures and other items in the garage would play convincingly in that vein—and he’d wind up spending his days in a hospital facility. Or perhaps worst of all, he’d somehow end up with a sentence like Prilo’s and be out in a handful of years …
However Behr went about it, it would take time, a day or two at least, to figure out. He had to hurry now. Just as he was about to close the refrigerator, though, he spotted a small amber jar to the rear of the middle shelf, and he reached for and opened it. He smelled the liquid inside, which was formaldehyde, and he gently shook and swirled the jar. A small chunk of flesh rolled and rotated in the fluid. Then he saw the green-colored design inked on the jagged piece of skin. It was Danielle Crawley’s shamrock tattoo. Behr hung his head over the jar for a moment before screwing it shut, putting it back, and closing the refrigerator.
That’s when he felt the slight vibration of the rear padlocked door rattling and realized someone was coming in. He had to hide, and moved blindly for a spot by the far wall, behind the slop sink, where a tool bench would obscure him. The door swung open with a creak and whoever was there left the lights off …
73
Here. Someone. Inside.
He steps in, pulling the door shut behind him, sealing the world out and the darkness in. Stacie, back at home, safe and unknowing, flies from his mind as his fingers find the lock on the knob and make sure it is secure. His feet move silently across the concrete. He heads right for the pegboard full of his equipment, his weapons. His hand finds the cool steel shaft of his entrenching tool. Not just familiar, but hard, strong, and sharp, it is ideal. He begins on a silent loop around the pitch-black space, past the edge of the couch, prodding at the blanket with the pointed end of the shovel blade to make sure no one is beneath it. He methodically eliminates potential hiding places one by one. Then, as he nears the back corner by the sink, he finds him.
He slams the entrenching tool into the floating ribs of the shadowy figure that is hunched by the slop sink. He hears a gasp and senses the man rolling along the floor in pain. He pulls the entrenching tool away and clangs it off the back of the man’s head. It should’ve stilled him, but instead he feels a searing stab of pain in his own knee, seeing that the man has shot out a kick only once it is on the way back.
Recovering, he leaps onto the figure, which is large and strong. His eyes are like those of a nocturnal animal’s now, and he sees who it is: the big man who had been in the parking lot, in the church basement, on his trail. His next target has come to him. He pounds away with fury at the body and head with one fist curled tight, and the other wrapped around the E-tool’s handle. He hears blasts of breath and grunts of pain. Any one of his blows can be the last one, stunning the man. Then he will own him and go to town. He is going to open this son of a bitch up.
Somehow the man disappears from beneath him. He feels the thud of the man’s feet kicking him in the gut, slamming out and thrusting him back and away. Then his own ankles are grabbed and yanked and he’s completely free of gravity. He’s falling. His head whips in a downward arc through the blackness. It bounces off the floor. Jagged sights float like carousel horses in front of his eyes. A punch to the
head. The big man, face in front of his. Metal rapping him in the skull—
Behr had him down. In the midst of a barrage of thunderous blows he’d somehow managed a double ankle sweep in the desperation and darkness. He heard the man’s head hit the ground, but the man hadn’t gone limp, as nearly anyone would have. Even now Behr heard him hissing and cursing, and sensed him whipping his head from side to side to clear the cobwebs. Behr rolled up, put a knee into the man’s chest, and punched him in the face several times. The back of the man’s skull bounced off the floor once, then twice, and Behr fumbled for his ankle, hoping to draw the Mag Pug. The man was monstrously strong, though, and caught Behr’s arm with a viselike grip he couldn’t break. He felt him buck wildly, threatening to dislodge Behr and flip him.
With a grunt, Behr pulled up and back and thrust his weight down, dropping an elbow across the man’s brow. He did it again, able to move more freely and land the elbow more cleanly the second time. And then once more. His arm finally came free, and Behr got the pistol out and brought the frame of it down onto the man’s face and skull over and over, feeling the bones start to give and hearing a liquid sucking noise. At last there was no more resistance, and the rag-doll quality to the man’s body told Behr it was done.
Behr fought for breath and forced his way through the ringing tones and dizziness in his head and balanced on one hand to press himself up to standing. He stumbled forward, clutching for his flashlight, clicking it on left-handed, and with the gore-covered revolver crossed over his wrist, shined it down onto the man’s face.
It was the man he knew to be Abler, floating in and out of consciousness, his face battered and torn, strange hairpiece askew and matted with blood, and still more blood spilling out of ripped and broken flesh. The man’s mouth moved in dumb gasps. Behr considered the mangled thing at his feet, the garage full of evidence now useless and tainted, and the lost reward. Maybe there was a way to get Abler up, to restrain him and put him back together, and for Breslau to help engineer some legitimate-sounding circumstances for all of it. He pulled Abler to a sitting position by the collar and considered the script he could give him, the threats he could make to force him to follow it. Maybe Behr could claim he was invited in and then attacked. He needed that money for his son.
But then Abler spoke, in what couldn’t have been his normal voice, through cracked teeth and a sideways jaw.
“It’s you,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“I was coming for you.”
“Here I am.”
“Help me …” he said. “Help me …”
Behr wondered how many similar pleas had been made of Abler, and how he must have reveled in it before denying them.
“Kendra Gibbons,” Behr said.
“Who?”
“Up on East Washington, a little over a year and a half ago. A pretty young blond girl.”
“They all are,” the killer said, memories flickering behind his eyes, animating them.
Then Mistretta’s words about a man like this in prison flashed through Behr’s mind, how he’d luxuriate in his deeds and be treated like a celebrity in safety and relative comfort if he even ended up behind bars at all, and it caused a boiling rage to wash away everything coherent and decent in Behr’s being. He stepped down hard on Abler’s right shoulder and raised the Mag Pug.
“Don’t … I … want to … live,” Abler said.
“You’re not going to.”
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I am death,” Behr said, quoting Abler’s own words back to him. He felt the valve close inside him. Then he fired two rounds dead center into the man’s sternum before he adjusted and put a last one straight into his eye, the left socket disappearing from recognition as it became a punched-in, gore-filled crater.
The rage left Behr along with the final bullet, and he staggered back, murder and failure all over him. Adrenaline shakes hit him hard, along with the pain. He sat down on the floor, away from the pooling blood, hoping it would all subside. The first strike had come out of nowhere. He hadn’t heard or sensed Abler was that close. It had cracked some ribs, and Behr felt his breath come now with sharp stabs. He clicked his flashlight on and off twice and then a third time, checking that Abler wasn’t rising like some unkillable ghoul. But he was dead, now and forever, his blood running down the channel he’d so carefully designed, and spilling into the well-placed drain that had been used for the blood of so many others.
It was mere luck that found Behr the one sitting where he was and Abler splayed out; luck that the shovel blows to the body hadn’t caught him in the liver and incapacitated him, that the strikes to his hard head hadn’t knocked him out, as close as they had come, and that he had managed to roll and land that first kick.
Behr waited five, then twenty, then thirty minutes, for someone to respond to the shots, as his pain settled to a dull ache. He spent the time trying to decide what he would say or what he should do. His options ran from fleeing to calling a lawyer, but in the end he did neither. The truth seemed like his only option when they arrived, especially considering what Breslau already knew. Behr would likely be charged with murder. It’d be easy to prove premeditation. He’d broken in armed after all. But there was no response. No one came.
He thought back to Abler’s arrival. Behr hadn’t heard it, he’d felt it. It was a vibration, an awareness, more than any sound. He got up and shined his flashlight about the garage. That’s when he saw the egg crate foam and heavy baffling lining the walls. Abler had soundproofed his personal torture chamber, and he’d done it well. Behr remembered the blacked-out window from his surveillance, and found the light switch and clicked it on. Stark overhead bulbs shined down on the reality of the situation. He’d made a hell of a mess.
He holstered his gun and approached the body. He located the man’s wallet and flipped it open to the driver’s license. Abler, Reinhard Peter. There was no doubt. Nor was there doubt in Behr’s mind at what was going to happen next. He steeled himself for what lay ahead and drew in a breath, then put the wallet in a drawer filled with screws and fuses. He had to be careful now. He couldn’t afford any mistakes. There’d be no commemorative photos of what he was about to do. The fact was, he needed to get Abler’s body out of the garage, and there was no doing it in one piece.
74
The highway unspooled in front of him like a mourner’s ribbon. Behr drove through the night, the speedometer pegged at what he hoped was an unticketable sixty-seven miles per hour, his trunk full of the remains of human evil, and the inside of the car heavy with the sense that he’d become the same in order to stop it. He fought white-line fever and visions of himself being found by the staties having fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed into a tree. But mostly he tried to will away the images that kept coming back on him in flashes nonetheless.
—Abler, stripped down, strange skin, pale and waxy. Completely hairless beneath the awkward hairpiece, was he physiologically designed to be more efficient at killing without leaving trace evidence?
—Behr himself stripped down for his work, to just his underwear and shoes.
—The hacksaw and a beef knife.
—The hoisting hooks and the drain.
—The concrete channel running red.
Everything he’d needed was in that garage, from the tools to the heavy rubber gloves, to the construction-grade contractor bags, to the cleaning supplies.
It’s just meat, Behr had said to himself as he set about the grimmest task he’d ever faced. Meat to be handled and processed. Don’t think about what it is. Don’t think about anything now, just do what needs to be done.
That was what he’d always told himself in the farmyard as a boy, in the slaughterhouse where he’d worked as a young man, and in the hunting field more recently, and that’s what he told himself again. The work was as physical as it was revolting, and he was streaming sweat as he fought back his nausea.
And when it was done, when everything was wrapped in heav
y-duty plastic and placed in the stained mason’s bags that Behr had found there, and assumed were for that very purpose, and once he’d scrubbed himself off with scouring powder at the slop sink, and had poured bottles of bleach around on the floor, because even though bleach made luminol glow, maybe nobody would think to use it if they didn’t see any blood, and because it would at least wipe out his own DNA, he paused. There was one more thing he wanted to do.
Behr looked at the refrigerator, and then crossed to it. He took the jar containing the piece of Danielle Crawley’s leg and put it in his pocket. He closed the refrigerator door and turned to go when some swatches of color that he’d missed before caught his eye now, with the overhead lights on. They were on top of the refrigerator, in a transparent plastic tub pushed back toward the wall. He saw that inside the tub were a few women’s shoes, including a single lavender pump. He reached for it and saw it was size seven, and the brand was Nine West. It was the match to the one found near where Kendra Gibbons had disappeared. The shoe went in his other coat pocket. He’d solved his case, and it did him absolutely no good.
Then it had been time to go. Behr took the entrenching tool, the item that had nearly ended his life, and secured it in the straps of one of the mason’s bags and grabbed another small shovel that was leaning against a wall.
He waited, pressing his ear against the door, listening but not hearing a sound outside, until he could wait no more. Gloveless now, he covered the doorknob with a rag and prepared to step out. He considered rigging the garage to burn after he’d left, it wouldn’t have been difficult with all the photography chemicals, but he thought better of it. He didn’t need the fire department and police responding and looking for Abler right away. The time before any search began would be to his advantage, and later, he knew, be it hours, days, or weeks, someone, perhaps the wife, would enter the garage seeking Abler, and instead discover the trove of horrible evidence. Then either there would be a massive news story with the authorities called in, or there wouldn’t be a peep. He wondered at the toll living with a sociopath for all these years had taken on the wife, and if she would tell the world what she had found, or if she had a bit of it in her in the first place, and would keep everything quiet.
