Psychopath (36 page)

"He’s our man," Clevenger said.  "I’m sure of it, I’ve got even more on him."

"I’ve got agents headed there."

"Whitney’s already poking around," Clevenger confessed.  "She got there yesterday.  She wanted to close the case herself, to prove something — I guess to you, or maybe to me.  I don’t know.  I tried to argue her out of it."

"You’ve got to be kidding me.  Where is she?"

"She’s staying at the Marriott Courtyard in Bitter Creek.  My partner North Anderson flew out to keep track of her."

"Good move," Warner said.  "If you want, get yourself to Logan, and I’ll have a plane meet you at the Cape Air terminal and fly you out.  You ought to be there when we nail this guy.  You deserve to be there."

That was an olive branch Clevenger had no problem taking.  "I’m on my way."  He grabbed his coat and ran.

On his way to the airport, he called North Anderson to fill him in.

Anderson answered from his seat at the coffee shop counter.  "Got a description?" he asked, after getting filled in on Wrens.

"About six feet tall.  Shoulder-length graying hair.  Blue eyes."

"Christ!" Anderson said, bolting for the motel room.  He noticed that Jonah’s car was gone.  He kicked down the door, saw McCormick on the bed.  His eyes scanned the rest of the room to make sure Wrens was really gone.  He checked the bathroom.  Empty.  He raced over to her.

He couldn’t rouse her.  He felt her wrist, got a decent pulse.  Then he unbuckled her restraints, gently tilted her head back to open her airway and listened for breath sounds.  She was breathing.

He noticed the two empty vials on the bedside table, took out his cell, and dialed 911.

"Bitter Creek Police," a woman answered.  "This call is being recorded."

"I need an ambulance.  The Ambassador Motor Inn.  I have a woman unconscious after being drugged."

McCormick heard the last sentence of Anderson’s 911 call.  She opened her eyes.

"Room 105," Anderson told the operator.

"Jonah Wrens," McCormick whispered, working to get the words out.  Anderson turned to her, saw her looking back at him.  He let out a sigh of relief.  "We know," he told her.  "There’ll be a hundred agents searching the whole..."

"He’s going home," she said, as if remembering something from a dream.

"Home?"

Suddenly she knew with dead solid conviction where Wrens was headed. "Find out where his mother lives.  He’s on his way there to kill her."

f i v e

Great Falls, Montana

1:20 A.M.

Jonah Wrens sat on the green crushed velvet sofa in the living room where he had spent his childhood, looking across a simple wooden coffee table at the woman who had raised him from birth.  The wall behind her was covered with crucifixes she had collected over the years, gifts from family and friends and parents of the fourth-graders she had taught for forty years at the local elementary school.

He picked up the cup of tea she had made him, turned and glanced out the window as he took a sip.  He could barely make out the shadow of a police cruiser waiting in the blackness outside the ranch-style house — waiting, no doubt, for more hunters.  They had him cornered.  Or so they thought.

"I’m so glad you woke me up.  I missed you," his mother said, in a melodious voice much younger than her seventy-nine years.  "You stayed away so long this time.  Six months.  They must have really needed you."

"I missed you, too," Jonah said.

He meant it.  Yet it was also a lie.  And he knew that was because he was talking to two very different women.

It was strange how she had lived more than one life.  Here was his mother, at seventy-nine, gray and sickly and kind beyond measure, a religious woman making peace with the world she would leave in a year or a decade, or perhaps two.  A mother to pine for.  A mother to come home to.  And yet he knew now that somewhere inside her was the mother who had tortured him, the psychopath who had oscillated between loving him and hating him, comforting him and terrorizing him, until whatever runaway circuits in her brain or mind or soul simply burnt themselves out.

Maybe time had healed her.  Or maybe her conversion was real.  Maybe she was reborn.

The irrational thing was the rage he felt now for
this
woman, the woman who had brought him his tea.  It made his heart pound and his head throb, made him hungry in precisely the way he had hungered for intimacy on the highways.  And though he knew now the source of that hunger, that knowledge did not take the hunger away.

Something was fundamentally misshapen in his psyche.  His need for intimacy was a voracious and insatiable beast that screamed always to be loved, always to be held, lest it drown in the terrible anxiety it had been to wonder which mother would be at home any particular day, any particular hour, any particular minute — the angel or the devil.

"Did you have many interesting cases?" his mother asked.

"A few," Jonah said.  He smiled through his pain.  "A boy named Sam Garber.  He was the most interesting.  A very brave boy with very big problems."

"And you helped him."  She gazed lovingly at him.  "I’m sure his parents were grateful."

"No," Jonah said.  "I couldn’t help him."

"Come now.  You’re always so hard on yourself."

He shook his head.  His eyes had filled up.

"Jonah?  What happened?"

He heard the sound of more cars coming up the road.  He stood and went to the door, saw two black trucks — SWAT trucks — park alongside the cruiser.  And he watched as black-suited men with rifles spilled out of them.  He turned back to his mother.  "Would you pour me another cup of tea?" he asked her.  "Then I’ll tell you everything."

She stood up slowly, grimacing at the pain in her joints, pushing herself onto diabetic, ulcerated feet, because her son, who she loved, wanted a second cup of tea.  And this was her pleasure after a long and tortured life.  This was what she waited for when he was on the road.  The chance to boil a cup of water, float a tea bag, add a little sugar, a little honey, the way he liked it.  Wash his sheets.  Press his clothes. Simple things, but meaningful things.  Loving things.  Little, infinite apologies for what she had been, the monstrous ways she had failed him.

She felt hot and dizzy standing over the stove and backed up.  She wiped her brow.  Maybe her sugar was low, she thought.  Maybe a little of the honey would help.  She took a teaspoon from the kitchen drawer, dipped it in the jar, and then slipped the sweet, sticky stuff between her lips.  It tasted good and it made her feel better.

When she turned around, Jonah was there, holding his open knife in his hand.

"Jonah?" she said.  "What are you doing?"  But she knew. 

He stepped closer to her and wrapped his arms around her.

She felt even more lightheaded.  Was that why she didn’t try to run? she wondered.  Or was it that her son’s arms felt so good around her.  Because she really was tired and she really had missed him and she really did love him.

Suddenly, beams of light streamed through the windows.  And Jonah found himself shielding his mother’s eyes from the glare.  He wondered if that instinct to protect her was a reflex hardwired in him.  A child’s instinctive impulse to protect its bloodline.  Or perhaps it was only another of the devil’s tricks, designed to distract, to make him lose his nerve.

A few moments later Clevenger’s voice came to Jonah, as if in a dream.  "Jonah, this is Frank Clevenger.  Come out, and no one will harm you."

Maybe, Jonah thought to himself, his whole life had been a dream.  Maybe morning was right around the corner.  He carried his mother out to the living room, sat her down on the couch.  She didn’t struggle, didn’t plead with him.

"Jonah," Clevenger bellowed.  "There’s no other way out."

Jonah reached to his calf and grabbed McCormick’s pistol.  He aimed at one of the windows toward the front of the house, pulled the trigger, and the window shattered. "I didn’t know you made house calls, Frank," he shouted.  "I’m honored."

"It doesn’t have to end this way."

"Of course it does.  You know it does."

Ten, fifteen seconds passed in silence.  "If you won’t come out," Clevenger said finally, "let me come in."

Jonah took a deep breath.  There was something exquisitely beautiful about the idea of Clevenger watching how his "therapy" would end.  He smiled at God’s wondrous poetry.  "The door is open," he called out.  "I promise you won’t be harmed.  You have my word.  As God is my witness."

*            *            *

Clevenger slowly walked through the door to the house and saw Jonah sitting on the couch beside his mother, holding her close to him, a knife to her throat.  The gun lay on the cushion beside him.  "Close the door," Jonah said.

Clevenger shut the door behind him.

"We finally meet."

"Finally," Clevenger said, taking a few steps closer.

"That’s far enough," Jonah said.  His hand drifted toward the pistol.

Clevenger stopped.  "Our work isn’t done.  Let’s talk."

Jonah shook his head.  "Let’s face it, Frank.  We’re exhausted.  You and me, both.  It’s been a long road."

"What is it that you want?"

"I suppose, what I’ve always wanted."  He smiled and held up his knife.

Clevenger looked on in horror as Jonah ran the blade of his knife across the palm of his hand, opening a deep gash.  He took his mother’s hand and cut her palm the same way.

She winced, but somehow kept herself from screaming.

Then, placing the knife back at her throat, Jonah took his mother’s lacerated hand in his own.  He closed his eyes an instant, took a deep, dreamy breath, then opened them again.

"Give me the knife, Jonah.  Let’s walk out of here together.  You see the truth now.  Let that be enough."

"As it often is," Jonah said.  "But not always."  He pressed the blade of the knife harder against his mother’s throat.

"Don’t do it," Clevenger said.  "All the other killings happened because you were blind to your rage.  Out of control.  Not this one.  God won’t forgive this one."

Jonah looked at Clevenger with sympathy.  "You did a good job, Frank.  A great job.  But some people can’t be healed by men, not even a man like you.  Or me.  Some people can only be healed by God."  He kissed his mother’s cheek tenderly.

"It’s all right, Jonah," she said, real love in her voice.  "You do what you need to do."

Jonah’s eyes filled up.  "What did you say?"

"I forgive you."

He started to weep.

"It’s my fault, Jonah," she said.

"Let her go," Clevenger said.

"I came here to kill her," Jonah said, smiling through his tears.  "I did.  But the woman I was looking for, the evil one?  She doesn’t even live here anymore.  Do you know why?"

Clevenger didn’t answer.

"Of course you do.  It’s because she’s inside me."

Clevenger saw Jonah’s hand drift toward the pistol.  He saw him smile a peaceful, almost innocent smile.

Clevenger took a step toward him.

He picked up the pistol, pointed it at Clevenger.

Clevenger stopped moving.

"It’s all right," Jonah said.  "I know exactly where I’m going.  And you should go home.  Love that son of yours the way he deserves to be loved."

Clevenger rushed him.

"I want to be free."  He pushed his mother into Clevenger’s path, put the barrel of the gun into his mouth, and fired a single shot into his brain.

"No!" Clevenger yelled.

Jonah’s mother screamed.  She scrambled back toward her son, threw her arms around him.  "Oh, God, no," she cried.  "Oh, God."  She tried to stop the blood from spilling out of him, but it just poured over her hands.  She sat down, cradled his head and shoulders in her arms, and began to rock him.

*            *            *

The pain inside Jonah’s head was unspeakable.  He could not catch his breath.  His heart fluttered like a wounded bird in his chest.  But in the haze between life and death, or between this life and the next, he suddenly felt the sun begin to shine brightly on his face.  He felt the air turn clean and crisp and cool.  The pain began to drift away.  And he found he did not need to breathe at all.

He looked up and saw that his fingers were deep inside fissures in the face of the most beautiful mountain he had ever climbed.  He saw with astonishment that the scars on his arms were gone.

The muscles of his arms and thighs and calves powered him higher.  His feet found solid shelves of rock everywhere.

He knew he had been climbing a long time, but he was not tired.  He felt stronger, in fact, with every step.  Both stronger and younger.  He flexed his right arm and moved still higher, latching on with his left hand.  His mind grew clearer.  He tried to search himself for feelings of fear or anger, but could find none.

With every step he took, he shed a year off his life, so that he felt childish as he neared the summit, and a little timid about finishing the trip.  What would become of him if he climbed all the way to infancy?  What would he then be, devoid of his life history?

How would he know himself?

And then he understood.  He had to let go of that self, with all its rage and all its fear and all its superior knowledge.  He had to find the pure light beyond it.

Suddenly, he felt completely at peace.  At one with himself and the universe.  Because he knew then that his wish was being granted.  He had the chance to be reborn.  He had the chance to be redeemed.  He had gotten where he needed to go.

Finally, his healing was in sight.

s i x

Judge Robert Barton, one of the toughest and wisest judges in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, looked down at the stacks of paper arranged before him, took off his half glasses, and stared out at the court.  He was a boulder of a man, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, with a booming voice and piercing eyes.  He made eye contact with Clevenger and Billy at the defense table, then looked back down at his stacks of paper.