Psychopath (19 page)

Have you ever wanted to kill, Frank?  Did you use alcohol and drugs to blunt that impulse?  Do you work to understand murderers in order to understand, yourself?

How did your father humiliate you?  Be specific.  If you wish me to continue being forthcoming with you, be so with me.

You cannot hope to reach the core of my psychopathology from a distance.

—A Man of God

They Call the Highway Killer

Within a few hours Clevenger was flying out of Boston to meet Whitney McCormick at the site the Highway Killer had identified in Utah.  He had arranged for North Anderson to look in on Billy while he was away.

He started to work on his response during the flight.  He wanted to empower Gabriel, the part of the killer that remained innocent and decent.

He believed the main reason Gabriel could not stop the murders was that he was weak — too pure, too good, entirely split off from the dark side of his nature, the ‘shadow’ side that included aggression.

Gabriel was all compassion, a reflection of his mother.  The Highway Killer was all rage, a reflection of his father.

To take control, Gabriel would have to tap into the dark side.  Like a surgeon cutting out a tumor, he would have to take a scalpel to his own soul and wield it decisively.

The Highway Killer was right to insist Clevenger tell him the humiliations he had suffered as a child.  He was right to ask whether Clevenger’s work searching for murderers reflected a fascination with destructiveness.  Because he needed to learn by example how to transmute his own rage into the desire to protect others.

You cannot hope to reach the core of my psychopathology from a distance
.

Clevenger would have to lead with his own scars, his bonafides as a man who remembered what it was to suffer as a boy.

The thought frightened him, partly because he didn’t relish the idea of revisiting his traumas, partly because millions of people would read things about him that were intensely personal — and embarrassing.

That included North Anderson.  And Kane Warner.  And Whitney McCormick.  And Billy.

What was the real risk, though?  Abandonment?  Isolation?  Did he not believe in his heart of hearts what he would have told a patient:  that revealing oneself — especially the parts that beg to be kept under wraps — is the path to genuine love and self-esteem?

If he couldn’t bear to tell his truth in the
New York Times
, how could he ask Gabriel to?

You cannot hope to reach the core of my psychopathology from a distance.

He picked up his pen and started to write:

Gabriel:

My father, now deceased, humiliated me in usual and unusual ways.  When he was drunk he used a belt on me.  I learned not to hide from him because it made the beatings worse once he found me.  I remember wondering how someone struggling just to stand up could ferret me out of the most remote corner of the house — deep inside a closet, curled under a bed, huddled behind an old coat hanging in the basement
.

Clevenger let his head fall back against his head rest, remembering.  He could almost smell his father’s alcoholic breath, see his bloodshot eyes, eyes that stayed frighteningly steady even when he was lashing out.  He took a deep breath, then leaned forward to write more.

He would come home ready for a fight.  Unlike your mother, mine lacked the courage to absorb his rage.  She often greeted him with an overblown complaint about some wrong I had done her during the day.  An untidy room.  A half-eaten meal.  Real or imagined ‘backtalk.’

It got to the point that I would meet him at the door with her, to get it all over with
.

Another memory flashed across his mind, then begged to stay off the page.  He forced himself to write it out:

I would wear nothing under my jeans because my father yanking down my underwear felt too humiliating and too frightening.  More than once, I thought he especially enjoyed that part.  And I didn’t know if his enjoyment was pure sadism or partly sexual.  I suppose I didn’t want to know, probably still don’t.

Sober, he was even more creative, opting for psychological over physical torture.  One of his favorites was to set me up by telling my mother and me that we would be going to an amusement park or to the beach or to buy the dog I desperately wanted.  We might get down the street or even to the parking lot of a carnival.  And then he would shake his head and laugh.  Only the punch line varied:

"You think you ’re going to play games and go on rides with a room that looks like yours?  Give me a break."

"You think I’m going to give you responsibility for a dog when you can’t take responsibility for yourself?  Give me a break."

"You think you’re gonna lay around on the beach when you’ve got homework to do?  Give me a break."

Looking back, the strangest part of the whole tired routine was how many times I fell for it, how much I wanted to believe in his capacity for kindness, how much hope I had that my world might turn bright-even for a day.

I hated him.  At some level I still do, even knowing he was a broken man who was suffering greatly himself.

As a child I thought of killing him more than once.  Is that killer still inside me?

Clevenger put his pen down and laid his head back again.

*            *            *

The thud of the plane landing at Canyonlands Field Airport awakened him.  He met Whitney McCormick at the Wayne County state police barracks.  They headed down Route 70 in a state police van with two troopers and Dr. Kent Oster, the county coroner.

A morning of freezing rain had yielded to late afternoon bright sun.  As they approached Moab, Route 70 offered up shimmering vistas as it coursed through the San Rafael desert, skirted the majestic Book Cliffs and Arches National Park, then curved north toward the Colorado Canyons.

They pulled over at Exit 42.  After just fifteen minutes of searching, Trooper Gary Novick yelled for the others.

When Clevenger reached him McCormick was already there.

"It’s bad," she said, staring down a path of matted weeds.

Clevenger looked off in the direction of McCormick’s gaze and saw a decaying female body, fully clothed in a simple, floral pattern dress and mint green cardigan sweater.  He started toward it, stopped after three steps.  The head had been severed from the body.  He scanned the ground and saw it several feet away in a pile of leaves, eyes open, staring back at him, wisps of gray hair catching the wind.  "My God," he muttered.

Dr. Oster knelt beside the corpse, craned his neck to study the wound.  "He’s a powerful man," he said.  "The spinal column is cut cleanly."  He leaned even closer.  "She’s been here several months, at least," he said.  He pulled on surgical gloves, peeked under the neck of the woman’s dress, glanced over at the leathery, disembodied face.  "Seventy.  Maybe seventy-five."  He stood up, walked over to the head, and crouched down beside it.  "Obvious traumatic facial injuries.  We’re talking multiple fractures — jaw, zygomatic arch.  The frontal sinuses are crushed."

"This isn’t the kinder, gentler Highway Killer," said Jackie McCune, the other trooper.  "He got a little carried away this time."

"Overkill," McCormick said.  "This one got to him."

The troopers started to comb the area for clues.

Clevenger walked to the body.  He stared down at the woman’s exposed arms.  "I don’t see any sign he took blood from her," he said.

Oster joined him.  He gently raised each arm to inspect the antecubital fossa.  "No venipuncture site," he said.  "There could be one elsewhere.  I’ll certainly flag that issue for the pathology team at the Bureau."

Novick came out of the woods carrying a handbag.  "Ten yards in," he said.  He held up a driver’s license.  "Paulette Bramberg.  Seventy-three years old.  Lived out on Old Pointe Road."  He looked at Clevenger and McCormick.  "That’s about ten miles from here.  I’ll send someone by."

f i v e

It had started to sleet.  Both Clevenger’s and McCormick’s flights were delayed a couple hours, so they grabbed dinner at the airport.

"This one breaks the mold," she said.

"In more ways than one.  I know we’ve been saying there’s no demographic pattern linking the victims," Clevenger said, "but this is the first elderly female victim we know of."

She shook her head.  "Why didn’t we see that before?"

"It’s hard to see a hole in a pattern as diffuse as the one the Highway Killer has created," Clevenger said.  "I think Paulette Bramberg is the very center of that pattern.  The hot spot.  I think she triggered something explosive in him."

"If we’re right about his age, she was old enough to be his mother.  But he worships his mother.  Or says he does."   She sipped her sparkling water.

"Idealizes her," Clevenger said.  "No one is all good.  But with his father abusing him every day, he needed to believe someone loved him perfectly.  My guess:  she ultimately let him down big-time, and he’s never dealt with it."

"Well, let’s steer clear of that issue for now.  We don’t need him connecting with whatever reservoir of rage shifted him from cutting throats to severing a head."

"I don’t think there’s any way to put the genie back in the bottle," Clevenger said.

The waiter appeared at the table.  "Everything all right for now?"

Clevenger glanced at McCormick, who nodded.  "Fine," he said.

McCormick picked up where they had left off.  "Just don’t mention it."

"He sent us to find one body out of who knows how many.  Consciously or unconsciously he wants to talk about what we found.  And the biggest thing we found is the overkill."

McCormick shook her head.  "If you had a patient in psychotherapy who made a stray comment that made you think he might have been abused as a child, you wouldn’t necessarily dwell on it.  You might just file it in the back of your mind, bring it up much later — and very cautiously."

"You might, you might not."

"My point is you wouldn’t want to cause a meltdown by going too far too fast."

"He didn’t make a stray comment.  He decapitated somebody.  He’s not being subtle."

She smiled.  "Write your letter, and we’ll argue it out then."

"Why not now?"

She sidestepped the comment.  "Have you started it?  The letter?"

Clevenger nodded.

"Want to give me an early look?"

He felt a familiar hesitancy and pegged it as resistance, the trepidation he had felt with his own psychoanalyst before laying himself bare.

"I have to read it eventually," she said.

He reached inside his back pocket, unfolded the letter, and handed it to her.

She read it, glancing up at him a few times with a combination of worry and warmth in her eyes.  She placed the sheet of paper on the table.  "I didn’t know you’d been through anything like that."

"It’s not something I would normally publicize," he said.

"You sure you want to?"

"No," he said.  "But he told me up front that this is quid pro quo.  What I give, I get.  And I believe him."

"What if he asks for more than you can deliver?  Isn’t anything off-limits?"

"I have to go the extra mile.  Because, ultimately, I’m going to ask even more of him.  I’m going to ask him to surrender his freedom."

"What’s the one thing you wouldn’t want to tell him?"

Clevenger smiled.  "You, first."

McCormick balked.  "Here’s my point: whatever that thing is, it’s your ultimate bargaining chip.  Don’t put it on the table too soon."

"Good advice."

"Occasionally I come through."  A few seconds passed.  She put her fork down and looked at him, tilting her head.  "Okay, I’ll go first."

He figured she was about to offer up a joke.  "You sure you want to put it on the table so soon?"

"Why not?"  She blushed in the lovely way she had a week before in her Quantico office.  "My father’s been such a powerful force in my life that every other man has paled by comparison."

Clevenger was taken aback by the revelation.

"I mean, it’s definitely not a sexual thing," she hurried to add.  "But he’s such a talented man.  He’s interesting on so many levels.  And he’s always taken very good care of me.  When I’m troubled by something he listens to me. 
Really
listens."

"And you haven’t been able to find that in anyone else."

"I thought I had a few times, but it didn’t last very long.  It seems like once you go to bed with a guy, he shuts down emotionally, instead of opening up.  I don’t know if that’s about me, or them.  And I don’t know if it’s all men or just the ones I pick."

"Who have you picked?" Clevenger asked.

"Surgeons, ever since medical school," she said.  "A neurosurgeon.  Plastic surgeon.  Opthalmologist.  Even a podiatrist."

"Not exactly listening arts."

She took a deep breath.  "Maybe if I hadn’t had my father’s complete attention I’d be willing to settle for less."

"Or maybe if you didn’t settle for less you’d feel like you were trading him in, betraying him."

That registered with her.  "Possible . . ."

"Bottom line — you don’t need to settle at all," Clevenger said, surprising himself with the obvious affection in his voice.

Her eyes showed she liked hearing it.  "Your turn," she said.  "What’s the one thing you wouldn’t want to publish in the
New York Times
?"

The answer came pretty quickly.  "I think being beaten by my father..."  He stopped himself, squinted to see through to the real truth at the back of his mind.  "I think he made me question whether I was worth anything — as a person.  As a man.  I think my whole life has been about proving that I am."