Psychopath (25 page)

"A woman was decapitated," she said.

"It’s so disgusting," the unit secretary said, swiveling in her seat to face Jonah and Donahue.  She was in her early thirties, plump, with a blonde braid that hung to the small of her back.  "People are so sick.  Whoever did it, I hope they find him and cut his goddamn head off.  Tie him to a chair, take little breaks along the way.  Let him watch it happen in a mirror."

A mirror?  Jonah’s eyes narrowed.  Could the two of them know what he had done?  Was he wearing the face of a killer?  He touched his cheek, glanced at his fingertips to make sure they did not come away stained with blood.  "They don’t know who did it?" was all he could think to say.

"It’s got to be the Highway Killer," Donahue said, her face suddenly alive with excitement.  "I guess we’ll all be reading about it in the
Times
.  I know I will."

She likes the letters, Jonah thought.  She likes them the way people like
People
magazine and TV movies.  Is that what he and his suffering had become?  A sideshow? 

The unit secretary was all smiles, too.  "He probably did the same sicko thing to that Paulette Bramberg woman Clevenger wrote about in his last letter.  In Utah?  He said she was brutalized — probably cut her head clean off just like this one."

As the secretary spoke, Jonah saw Paulette Bramberg’s eyes staring up blankly at him from the bed of leaves off Route 80 in Utah.  The image lasted only a moment, but long enough to convince him Clevenger hadn’t lied to him in his last letter.  He had killed a woman with brutal force before.  But only once before?

"Hates women," Donahue said.  "Ask me, that’s Sam Garber in twenty, thirty years."

Jonah knew he should say something, knew it was his turn to speak.  "Sam Garber?" was all he could manage.

"He’s been admitted five times in the last eighteen months," the unit clerk said.

Donahue shook her head.  "He’s got the whole pedigree of a budding sociopath:  lights fires, hurts animals, wets the bed."

"We have to keep his mother away from him," Jonah said.

"Good luck," Donahue said.  "Social Services hasn’t lifted a finger to protect him."

"Why not?" Jonah asked.

"He goes with the party line.  Parrots back the stories his parents feed him about how he got hurt.  No one’s been able to prove otherwise."

"No one
wants
to prove otherwise," the ward clerk chimed in.  "It’s not like every group home in the state would be lining up to take him.  He’s a pain in the ass.  Assaulted the staff a bunch of times.  Tried to set fire to the hospital twice."

"He needs to set fire to his mother," Jonah said automatically, horrified to hear his own words as they came out of his mouth.  But were they his words?  What was happening to him?  He laughed to take the edge off what he had said, but his laughter sounded hollow, mechanical.

The ward clerk and Donahue glanced at one another.

"I suppose that’s one way to look at it," Donahue said.  She cleared her throat.  "Get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, Dr. Wrens?"

He summoned every bit of positive energy he could. "A little joke," he said with a wink.

Dr. Corrine Wallace, the hospital’s chief of psychiatry, appeared at the door to the nurses’ station.  She was an attractive woman about forty, with shoulder-length brown hair and a rare and infectious optimism that her staff and patients relied upon. But now her face and her voice were somber.  "May I see you a minute?" she asked Wrens.

"Of course," he said, tentatively.

"It’s about what happened at the diner."

Jonah froze as his paranoia soared.

"We were just talking about it," the ward clerk said, "hoping they fry that bastard."

Maybe he had been spotted at the crime scene after all, Jonah thought.  Maybe the police were waiting for him this very minute, outside the door to the locked unit.

"Shall we?" Wallace asked him.

The two of them walked silently down the hall, into Jonah’s office.

"Care to sit down?" Jonah asked.

She shook her head.  "We work very closely with police departments in the area," she started.  Jonah slipped his hand inside the front pocket of his pants, gripped his folding knife.

"A Sergeant John ‘Buck’ Goodwin called this morning," she went on.  "He’s the detective assigned to the murder in Bitter Creek.  I told him I would help him."

Were they using Wallace as the ‘good cop’? Jonah wondered.  Did they actually think he might roll over and let them search his hotel room without a warrant?

"In what way?" he asked her.

"The owner of the diner and the employees were just absolutely wrecked by this thing," Wallace said.  "The victim — Pierce, her name was — was very well liked.  Her daughter happens to waitress there, too.  The whole staff is like a big, extended family." She paused.  "Normally, I would never ask a locum to do this, but I have to be out of town for a seminar later today.  And Dr. Finnestri really isn’t comfortable with trauma victims."

Jonah could hardly believe what he was hearing.  Was Wallace really about to ask him to counsel Pierce’s coworkers?  Her daughter?  Was this God’s way of punishing him, making him see firsthand the suffering he had wrought?  It terrified him and touched him.

"I don’t think it would take more than two or three hours of your time," Wallace said.  "But if there’s any way you could talk with these people by phone.  The daughter, especially."

"I’d like to help," Jonah said, speaking not only to Wallace, but to God.  "In fact, I’ll invite each of them to visit with me right here at the hospital."

"This is clearly not in your job description.  We can pay you something extra."

"I wouldn’t think of it.  It’s the least I can do," Jonah said.

*            *            *

Jonah met with Sam Garber half an hour later.  It felt good to lose himself in the boy, to forget what had happened the night before.

Sam was stocky and much taller than most nine-year-olds and spoke in a monotone that made him sound older, too.  Only his soft skin and the bangs cut straight across his forehead gave him away.  He sat bolt upright in the chair opposite Jonah’s desk, his brow furrowed, a slight frown on his face as he told Jonah how clumsy he was, how he’d fallen down and hurt himself again and again, how all he wanted was to go home to his mother and father.

"That’s not going to happen this time," Jonah said.

The furrows in Sam’s brow deepened.  "I know you can’t keep me here," he said tentatively.

Jonah heard a plea in Sam’s words.  You won’t keep me here.  You can’t rescue me.  He knew he had to demonstrate his resolve, to prove Sam could place himself in his hands.  "I can and I will," he said.  "There is no possibility you will go home from here.  You’ll go somewhere safe.  Because I know exactly what your mother is doing to you."

"She’s not doing anything."

"Have you ever seen me at this hospital before?" Jonah asked.

"No."

"Do you know why they call me in?"

Sam shrugged.

"I can read minds," Jonah said.

"Tell me about it," Sam scoffed.  "What are you, some sort of superhero?  Got X-ray vision, too?"

"I’ll show you."

Sam hesitated, which told Jonah he wasn’t so certain mind-reading was impossible.  "Go ahead," he said.  "I don’t care."

Jonah stood and walked over to him.  "Can I touch your head?" he asked.

"This is dumb," Sam said.  But he dropped his head slightly.

"Close your eyes," Jonah told him.

Sam did as he was told.  He might look twelve or thirteen, might have suffered through much more than his age would predict, but he was nine, still suggestible, still willing to believe and able to hope that there were rare people in the world with special powers — maybe even enough power to save him.

Jonah laid his hands on the boy’s head, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath.  He pictured the S-shaped spiral fractures of Sam’s radius and humerus.  "When your mother hits you," he said, "she holds you by the arm, and you twist and turn to get away."

Sam stayed silent.

Jonah remembered Heaven Garber’s tall tales about Sam falling down the stairs, falling off his bicycle, backing into the fireplace.  Having listened to countless victims and countless perpetrators, he knew that her stories probably contained elements of truth.  Combining fact and fiction creates the most powerful deception.  "One time," Jonah ventured, "you tried to get away from her while she was holding you that way, hitting you, screaming at you, and she let go all of a sudden, and you fell down the stairs."

Sam shut his eyes more tightly, as though fighting off the memory.

"Did she laugh at you?" Jonah asked.  "Call you clumsy?"  He felt Sam’s head nod once under his hands.  "Did the same thing happen with the fireplace?  She let go?"

"Uh-huh," Sam said.

"You fell back into the screen."

Sam nodded again.

Jonah pictured Heaven Garber taunting Sam as he cried.  He could almost hear her cackling.  He moved his palms to the sides of the boy’s face, felt his tears begin to flow, then felt himself fill with sadness.  How wonderful to be swept away by that tide of grief, carried far from his own worries of what he had become, what he was capable of doing.  "Where was your father?" he asked, as quietly as though he were praying.

"I don’t know."

"Did you ever tell him what really happened?"

"She said he’d never believe me," Sam said.  "She said she’d make him send me away to a reform school for lying — and the other stuff, like with those animals.  Hurting them.  She said I’d never see him again."

"And you thought he would choose her over you?"

Sam shrugged.

Jonah let all his breath out, kneeled in front of Sam.  He looked into the boy’s eyes.  "It’s out in the open now," he said.  "No changing your story, no matter what.  Deal?"

"But what’s she gonna do to me?"

"She can’t do a thing."

"Why not?" Sam asked.

Jonah thought of the way Hank Garber had been taken aback when he had mentioned losing Sam forever.  "Because your dad will choose you," he said.  He smiled at him.  "You’re kind of a superhero yourself."

"Me?" He shook his head.  But he was hooked.  "What do you mean?"

"You had all the power all along.  Not your mother.  You just didn’t know it."

"You sure about that?  I don’t feel very powerful."

"Sure as sure can be," Jonah said.  He looked deeply in Sam’s frightened eyes.  "What do you say?  We have a deal?  Your story doesn’t change?"

Furrows fanned across Sam’s brow again.  He caught his lower lip between his teeth, chewed it a few seconds.  "Deal," he said.

n i n e

Afternoon, Tuesday, April 8, 2003

Quantico, Virginia

An agent named Phil Steiner escorted Clevenger from the lobby of the FBI Academy to the pathology laboratory.  Kane Warner and Whitney McCormick were already gloved and gowned, standing beside another woman who was inspecting a female body laid out on a stainless steel dissecting table.  Clevenger pulled on the necessary garb and joined them.

"We figured we might as well start our meeting here," McCormick explained as Clevenger reached the table.

Kane Warner acknowledged Clevenger with the briefest of nods.

"The body from Wyoming came in about an hour ago," McCormick went on.  "Sally Pierce, sixty-two."

Clevenger looked at Pierce and lost his breath.  She had been beaten beyond recognition, her eyelids puffed out like a toad’s, her cheekbones dented, her lower lip dangling from ruby shreds of tissue, her broken teeth coated with dried blood.  Clumps of her hair were missing, her scalp below pounded so thin in places that bone showed through.  Her ears were the color of eggplant.  A jagged laceration and black and blue contusions encircled her neck.

Clevenger looked up at McCormick.  The contrast between the corpse and her natural beauty made her look otherworldly.  He felt the urge to hold her, to kiss her, to be alive with her.

"I’m Elaine Ketterling," the woman at the head of the table said, holding out a gloved hand.  "Assistant Chief of Pathology."

Clevenger shook her hand.

Ketterling motioned toward Sally Pierce’s head.  "As I was pointing out, we obviously have severe contusions to the face, ears, and scalp, consistent with a sustained and extreme beating.  We’re certain to find facial fractures and brain hemorrhaging once we demask and get an MRI."  She curled her fingers under Pierce’s chin, gently tilted back her head.  "The closed head trauma would have been enough to kill her," she said, "but she also sustained a fourteen-centimeter-deep laceration to her neck, six centimeters above the clavicles."  As Ketterling exerted more pressure, the jagged laceration around Pierce’s neck opened to a red-purple cleft, then gaped to a canyon that exposed Pierce’s transected windpipe, jugulars, and carotids like a schematic out of Gray’s Anatomy, "The wound extends partway through the spinal column," Ketterling said, "bowing toward the end, consistent with the bent blade of the knife found at the scene.  It couldn’t quite do the job."

"Did he use a knife that was already in the diner?" Clevenger asked McCormick.

McCormick nodded.  "The owner IDed it.  No weapon to trace."

Ketterling moved alongside the dissection table, running her hands along Pierce’s shoulders, down her arms, over her forearms, wrists, and hands.  "The bruising on the upper extremities is much less severe," she said.  "Much more diffuse.  There’s no sign her arms or wrists were bound.  More likely the perpetrator knelt right here to keep her from moving."  She pointed out two large, elliptical bruises along Pierce’s biceps.  Then her hands continued to travel — down Pierce’s legs and ankles, to her feet.  "No obvious lacerations anywhere other than her neck," she said.  "I suspect her fractures will be confined to her facial bones and skull.  I’ll have more definitive data after we get a full-body CT."

"No venipuncture site?" McCormick asked.