Psychopath (21 page)

She turned onto her back, showing her real, sixteen-year-old breasts, each nipple pierced by a genuine 14-karat gold bolt.  The pair had cost her a week’s allowance.

"I got to get out of here before he gets home," Billy said.

He felt a little guilty for smoking the pot, but he hadn’t smoked nearly as much as Casey, and he put eighty percent of the blame for his slip on her and Auden Prep and Clevenger and Mr. Fitzgerald at the shipyard.  Billy wasn’t the one, after all, who had bought the joints in the first place.  He wasn’t the one who had decided to leave school.  He wasn’t the one who had picked the fights that ultimately got him thrown out.  He wasn’t the one who had brought the reporters back into his life.  He wasn’t the one who’d taken two tugboats into the shipyard to scrape and paint hour after hour, day after day, when what they really needed was to be sunk in Boston Harbor.  And he wasn’t the one who had decided he should stay alone in Chelsea while Clevenger flew cross-country with the hot, blonde FBI shrink who Billy had seen on television.

"You going to do it?" Casey asked.  "Take off?"

"Just for a while," Billy said.  "Two, three days.  I have to clear my head."

"Use our cottage in Vermont.  I have the key.  It’s on Lake Champlain, outside Burlington.  It’s kind of cool.  Bare bones.  Woodstove, that kind of thing.  It was my grandparents’.  Nobody’s ever up there during the winter."

Billy could not have put into words exactly why he wanted to leave.  And he would have denied the truth — that his leaving was a play for Clevenger’s attention.  He only knew that he felt lousy — a combination of lonely and anxious and angry — and needed to get away from that feeling.  "You couldn’t tell anyone," he said.

"Like I ever would?"  She ran her hand down Billy’s smooth, muscled abdomen.  "Don’t go yet."

He had sex with Casey the way he pumped iron, to prove he was strong, that he was a real man, that he was invulnerable.  He wanted to touch her everywhere in order to prove he was untouchable.  So that when she tensed her legs, arched her back, and cried out, he felt a great weight being lifted off his shoulders and sighed in a way that young Casey wrongly took to mean that he had come with her.  The truth was that he was long gone.

*            *            *

Casey left the loft first.  Billy cleaned up the remnants of their joints, wrote out a note saying he’d be away ‘a couple days,’ then left through an exit in the basement to avoid the reporters massed on the sidewalk outside the building.  He took the commuter rail from Chelsea to Boston’s South Station and caught the 2:50
P.M.
departure of the Amtrak ‘Vermonter’ to Burlington, via Springfield, Massachusetts, all in all a nine-and-a-half-hour trip. 

He slept all the way to Springfield.  The layover there was two hours, so he grabbed a cheeseburger and fries and poked around the shops in the station.  He bought a pair of mirrored sunglasses and a bandana.  At a magazine concession he spotted the
New York Times
, scanned the front page, and saw they had run another of the Highway Killer’s letters, the one Clevenger had read a day earlier, before leaving for Utah to find Paulette Bramberg’s body.  He tried to make himself walk right past it, tried to prove to himself how little he cared what Clevenger was up to, how he’d gotten the message loud and clear to stay out of his business and out of his way.  But he couldn’t quite pull it off.  Because he did care.  He bought a copy and tucked it under his arm, telling himself he’d read it on the train — when and if he felt like it.

*            *            *

With the time change and an hour’s delay into Logan, Clevenger didn’t get back to the loft until nearly 9
P.M.
   A dozen television and print reporters were still waiting there and mobbed him, calling out questions about whether he had truly broken ranks with the FBI, whether the Highway Killer was more in control of their public psychotherapy than he was, whether he thought the Highway Killer was old or young, black or white, possibly even female.  Clevenger answered with a single ‘No comment’ as he pushed his way through them, fueling a round of much more personal questions to which Clevenger didn’t respond at all:  Was his drug use truly under control?  Had he ever used intravenous drugs?  Had he disclosed his use of drugs to the Department of Social Services before adopting Billy Bishop?  Would he disclose that information now?

He was almost to his door when Josh Resnek, publisher of the local
Chelsea Independent
, called out a question that made him stop and turn slowly around.

"What happens if you cure this guy but never find him?" Resnek asked.  "You okay with that, Doc?"

The other reporters fell silent.

Resnek was a tall, broad man about fifty, half-shaven, with weathered skin and a full head of wild, salt-and-pepper hair.  He looked like the drummer in the
Spirit of ’76
painting, only about twenty years younger.  Back when Clevenger’s days had ended with three scotches at the Alpine Lounge up the street from his loft, Resnek — part reporter, part philosopher, part genius, part lunatic — had been about the best company he could hope for at the long bar.  The man could talk Chelsea sports, politics, history going back decades.  And when the two of them were on their third round, they could sometimes really talk — about the trouble with family, and the difference between the law and justice, and the miracle of feminine beauty, and the fear of death.

"If I cure him but never find him?" Clevenger echoed, stalling.

"That’s what he wants, right?" Resnek pushed.  "To be healed, without being caught.  And you’re very good at getting into people’s heads.  That’s why he picked you in the first place."

Clevenger thought about the scenario Resnek was painting.  And the answer that came to him was not only the one in his heart, but the one the Highway Killer himself would have wanted to hear, which was a good thing because the reporters — including the ones from national television networks — were listening very closely to what Clevenger was about to say.  "I care that he gets well and stops killing people," he said.  "The rest is up to the FBI."

He turned and reached for the door, pulled it open.

"Are you saying you won’t help them catch him?" a reporter from Fox yelled.

He stepped inside.

"How long will you keep treating him if he keeps killing?" another from CBS called after him.

He pushed the door closed behind him and stood a few seconds with his back to it, then started up the five flights to his loft.

Inside the loft, the smell of marijuana was still thick in the air.  He called Billy’s name, got no response, checked his room, found it empty.  He followed the odor to where it seemed strongest, pulled the wastepaper basket out from under the kitchen sink, and saw the butts and ashes Billy had dumped there.  His pulse shot up, and his jaw tightened.  The kid was going into detox that day, period.  No more cat and mouse games.  Detox, or out of the house for good.  The choice was his.  Then he spotted the note Billy had scrawled on a torn piece of notebook paper taped to the kitchen counter.  He read it.  "You’ve got to be joking," he said, his teeth clenched.  "Pain in the ass!"  But his anger crashed into waves of guilt and worry.  Guilt, because he caught himself resenting Billy for taking his attention away from the Highway Killer — as if the investigation, not fathering, were his first priority.  Worry, because Billy had stumbled into plenty of trouble right under Clevenger’s nose and could end up in a hell of a lot more on the streets.

He tried Billy’s mobile phone, but heard it ringing in his bedroom.  He called North Anderson at home.

Anderson picked up.

"It’s Frank," Clevenger said.

"Welcome back.  You got stranded, huh?  With McCormick.  Some guys have all the—"

"Listen, I could really use your help."

"I got your message about the body," Anderson said.  "Decapitated.  Your man’s throwing curves now."

"Not only with the investigation," Clevenger said.  "With Billy.  He took off."

"Took off?  I saw him yesterday before dinner.  He had a date with that Casey girl."

"He left a note saying he’d be gone ‘a couple days.’  He also left a bunch of marijuana around.  He’s back on drugs.  And he obviously doesn’t care that I know it."

"Jesus," Anderson said.  "Any idea where he went?"

"None.  I don’t know if Casey has anything to do with it.  From the amount of ash in the garbage, there was certainly enough marijuana around to have gotten them both high."  He shook his head at the realization that he had never met Casey and didn’t remember her last name.

"Where is she from?" Anderson asked.

"Newburyport, I think.  At least Billy headed up there once or twice to meet her.  I know she also met him for lunch a couple times at the shipyard.  Maybe she knows him through someone there.  Or she might go to one of the schools Auden Prep has their ‘get-togethers’ with."  He let out his breath.  "For all I know, she could be his dealer."

"I’ll start with the shipyard, then drive to the Prep." Anderson said.  "We’ll find her.  Hopefully she can tell us where he went."

"I know a few cops up in Newburyport," Clevenger said.  "I’ll call them."

"I can handle this, Frank.  I’ve done more than a few missing persons cases, remember?  A couple hundred more.  You’ve got your hands full right now."

That stung, even though nothing in Anderson’s tone suggested he meant it to.  "That could be the problem," Clevenger said.

"Hey, give yourself—"

Clevenger wasn’t about to give himself a break or a little credit or whatever else Anderson was about to suggest.  "Call me on my cell the minute you find out anything?"

"Sure thing."

*            *            *

Billy was most of the way to Burlington, Vermont, when he flipped on the light, pulled the
New York Times
out of the seat-back pocket in front of him, and started to read the Highway Killer’s letter.  He read about the killer’s idyllic fourth birthday party at the park, then read and reread the horror story of his arrival back home:

The door to our house was open.  My mood fell.  My father was at home.  He came at us the moment we walked inside, backhanded my mother to the floor, ranting that he ’d told her there was no money for the ‘little bastard’s fucking party.’  I stepped between the two of them, and he backhanded me.  My vision blurred.  I fell to the floor.  I tasted blood in my mouth.  My front tooth wiggled in its socket as my tongue moved against it.  I saw ripped pages from my books, torn pieces of my stuffed animals, my Hot Wheels cars rain down around me.  Then I watched as he crushed his heel into each and every one of the cars.  My mother cowered in the corner, weeping.  I wished I were older, bigger, stronger, able to defend her.  She held a single finger to her beautiful lips, warning me to stay quiet, then blew me another kiss.  And even with the taste of blood in my mouth, I felt safe and secure, even victorious over the monster who called himself my father.

"Bullshit, you wanted to defend her," he said aloud.

A fat man sleeping across the aisle stirred, grunted, fell back asleep.

Billy squinted at the page, shook his head.  "And she blew you a kiss?" he whispered.  "Give me a fucking break."

He didn’t have to work very hard to remember the feelings his own beatings had sparked in him when he was four years old.  His mother had been at home.  But he was too scared to think about protecting her.  He was busy trying not to cry, because tears didn’t extinguish his father’s violence, they inflamed it.  And his mother wasn’t blowing him any kisses while his father’s strap broke skin.  She was locking herself in the bathroom so she wouldn’t get whipped herself and wouldn’t see what was happening to him.

Did he hate her?  No.  She was irrelevant, powerless, a prisoner like he was.  But she certainly didn’t make him feel safe and secure.  That part of the Highway Killer’s letter was just more bullshit.

The Highway Killer was fantasizing, maybe even deluded.  A psychopath.  Maybe the guy actually
believed
this woman was alive in his house, his guardian angel making goo-goo eyes at him while he got the crap beat out of him.

Billy laid his head back, closed his eyes.  And after a minute or two he remembered something key.  He remembered his own fantasy while his father was taking that strap to him.  It wasn’t for a waif of a mother who would cower in the corner and whisper sweet nothings.  It was for a father who would love him.  A man who would take care of him.

What he fantasized about was the very opposite of the father he had, and he was willing to bet the Highway Killer was fantasizing about the very opposite of his mother. 
She
was the one who had backhanded him to the floor, crushed his toys, called him ‘little bastard.’

He felt eager to tell Clevenger what he thought of the letter, which made him feel foolish.  "Like he cares what you think," he scolded himself.

He would have completely dismissed the impulse to reach out were it not for another revelation that visited him as his train sped north.  He realized that Clevenger was the kind of person he had fantasized about all those times his father had stood over him, ranting and swinging.  Someone who would stand by him.  Fight
for
him, not with him.  Maybe that was what made it so hard to live with him.  Maybe that’s what all the drugs were about.  Maybe he was having trouble believing in something he had dreamed of — a real father, a man who really loved him.

"You are one sad case, Bishop," Billy muttered.  "The guy doesn’t give a shit about you."  But the words didn’t stick because they were made out of fear and nothing else.  The fear that he was unlovable.  The fear that he could lose what he had found, that Clevenger might fail him, turn out to be an illusion.  And that would be sad as hell, and embarrassing, too.  Because the truth was that Billy was starting to love Clevenger right back.