The Convulsion Factory (13 page)

“
You
understand, I can see it in your eyes on the screen.
You
know what it takes to get noticed, you’ve got the formula down. I was too smart for my own good at first, I never killed quite the same way twice … and nobody thought to connect them. But then I wised up.” He tapped his temple. “I developed a trademark. And now the whole city knows me. Just like they know you.”

“So, this work arrangement.” Keep him talking, keep him on his own twisted agenda. “What’s in it for me?”

He wet his lips like a child at Christmas. “I can call you, tell you where I’ve just been. You’ll get the jump on everyone else. You understand, you know what it takes.”

She kept him talking about particulars: timetables she kept, ethics of cooperation, randomly touching on anything she could think of to make him believe he was being taken seriously. At last, when fantasies of lasting stardom had gotten the better of him, she sunk the vital hook:

“Why don’t we do a background piece. Right now.” Shaking inside her shell, Sandra pointed to her camcorder in a jumble of electronics beside the TV. “Tell me more about yourself.”

“Okay. Yeah. Good idea.” He grew rigid, as if scenting an ulterior motive. “But keep me in shadow. I can’t have anyone else knowing what I look like. You’ll have to backlight me. That’s how they do it on TV.”

She crossed the room and knelt beside her camcorder, went through the motions of loading a cartridge and checking the battery pack. She breathed a quick prayer, then stood and hurled the camera at the Tapeworm’s head. Plastic cracked, and he roared in surprise and rage.

She was running then, full-tilt toward the bedroom, thanking the gods of aching feet for her L.A. Gear shoes, then falling to the bedroom floor by the nightstand, opening the drawer and pulling out the .32-caliber Colt, aiming back down the hallway as he bled and raged a slashing path after her.

Aiming for his head…

Not believing herself when the professional shell refused to submit to the personal core. Kill him now and here’s where the story ends. Let him live, and the arrest, trial, sentencing, the publicity … these would go on and on. Play it right, parlay it into a weeknight anchor slot, then a ticket out of bush league local into a network correspondent’s position. She saw it all.

And aimed for his leg.

*

Sandra Riley and her crew and their peers hover around the Municipal Court for hours, like buzzards, until every last scrap is devoured and there’s nothing more to glean. Of Darryl Hiller there is no trace. The only reasonable theory — that somehow he got into the building ductwork from within the bathroom — is invalidated. Darryl Hiller has pulled a Houdini of stupefying proportions.

The day’s best footage is of a man who gives his name as Reggie Blaine — the stocky redheaded fellow who was assaulted in the bathroom after Hiller somehow freed himself and smashed his guard’s face into the porcelain sink. Blaine tells an upsetting tale of being forced to trade clothes with the madman, then submit to the indignity of his handcuffs inside a stall so he couldn’t see where Hiller went next.

That night, Sandra and her crew go for badly-craved drinks at a favored watering hole called Turnstiles. The mellow wood and brass are comforting, but tonight there is no quick wit and cynic’s banter. Tonight there’s only morose reflection.

“Why don’t you let us take you home tonight?” Kevin suggests. His dark face, usually amiable, is pinched with worry.

Sandra shakes her head. “Thanks. But that’s okay.”

“Supposing he shows up again at your place. Sand, you’ve got to be number one on his list.”

She steadies her hands around a margarita. “The police called me at the station this evening. I’ll be safe. They’ll have people all over my building.”

Kevin shrugs. “Still might need someone to talk to. Come on. You got a comfortable couch, I can last it a night there.”

She touches the back of his hand across the table. He’s probably the best friend she has in the world, and all she can professionally aspire to is to give him cause to watch her dust while she heads to New York. Sometimes she has to wonder who the true worm in all of this really is.

“He won’t be back,” she says with certainty. “He won’t.”

“How you know? Sick twistoid like that, you can never tell.”

“He won’t.” The margarita is cold, salty, anesthetizing. “I already gave him what he wanted all along. He got what he wanted.”

“What’s that, Sand?”

She bows her head with the shame of a fool duped by an elaborate con game of heart and soul and wallet. And she sighs.

“A public forum.”

*

Four weeks earlier, May:

Darryl Hiller was as anxious to break the silence of his jail cell as the city was to learn what made him tick. One catch: He would talk only with Sandra Riley. His mentor.
ActioNews 8
gained clearance from the police and the prosecutor’s office, whose primary stipulation was that the interview be conducted after the verdict, so as to fuel no claims of publicity interfering with his right to an impartial trial. Post-trauma stress behind her, Sandra set about the task of producing a week-long series of special reports on the mind of the Tapeworm.

The interview was conducted in a sterile room in the county jail, unfurnished except for a scarred table. Kevin set up two cameras and lights; sound levels were monitored. Darryl Hiller was the last to arrive, manacles on his wrists and ankles, with a pair of Rushmore-faced deputies standing guard a few feet away in case he got frisky.

roll tape. three, two, one

“I forgive you,” was the first thing he said to her. “I don’t hold it against you that you turned me in. I was disappointed at first, sure. But you played it well. Now I understand it had to be this way.”

“Did you
want
to get caught six months ago?” she asked.

He shook his head, eyes full of visions no one else in the room could perceive. “No.” A smile. “But it had to be that way. I’d gone as far as I could staying anonymous. I had to go to the next level. Beyond. And now?” He beamed. “Everybody knows Darryl Hiller.”

Sandra thought he still looked so unremarkable in that chair, across that table. Still pale. His hair was trimmed shorter and he looked boyish, his face still plain. Only a small scar marked his forehead to commemorate contact with her camcorder. His hands fidgeted on the table, more out of idleness, she thought, than nerves. She decided it was better to let him ramble and free-associate rather than try to direct him in an orderly flow of Q&A. They had plenty of tape to roll.

He told stories of childhood. What went wrong? Everything. Nothing. He said he’d been a sometimes bedwetter in gradeschool and that his mother used to tape his prepubescent penis to his lower belly every night as punishment, and whip him in the morning if he had freed it. Then he laughed and said he’d made it all up. The truth could’ve been anything.

“Sixteen women raped and suffocated,” Sandra cut in at one point. Properly outraged, under control. Professional. “
Why
did you do it? Your core reason.”

He tilted his head back, let his gaze rove over the ceiling. He had a habit of avoiding eye contact when answering.

“The worst crime a man can inflict on himself is anonymity. It eats people alive inside if they go too long with their grubby little lives, not counting for anything, good or bad. They just exist. No one should have to live an anonymous life. Me? I had the courage to become known. That’s all. How else could I do it? I don’t have a cure for cancer or zits. I can’t balance the federal budget. I’m not Tom Cruise in some new movie. So I had to use my imagination. And the tools at my disposal.” Now, finally, eye contact. “And you. You inspired me. Because you’ve got it down to an art. You know what it’s like to be public property.”

“Did you believe you had some sort of moral superiority?”

He looked irritated, as if she’d missed the point entirely. “It doesn’t have anything to do with morality. Or superiority. It’s a question of economics. Supply and demand.”

“Economics,” she repeated.

“Right,” he said. Most natural thing in the world. “When does newspaper circulation rise? When does everyone tune in TV news? Not when the doctor with the cure is on. Not when a budget analyst is on. Not when Tom Cruise is on. No. It’s when there’s a killer on the loose. You know … we’re not so different, you and me. There’s a symbiosis. You need me as much as I need you.”

She was about to formulate a rebuttal, but he broke in: “Do you believe in cancer?”

She flubbed her first try, flustered. Have to edit that out later. “Of course. Everyone knows someone affected in some way by cancer.”

He nodded. “And do you believe in rats?”

She didn’t like this track of inquiry. “Of course I do.”

“So you’ll acknowledge the cause-and-effect relationship between them.”

“Rats cause cancer?” Her voice was incredulous.

“No, that’s backwards. Cancer causes rats.”

“You’ve lost me with this, Darryl.”

He hunched forward, toward Sandra and camera one. “Cancer’s out there. It’s out there. Feeding on people. All these food additives and chemicals and crap in the environment? Cancer has a field day with that stuff. For cancer, it’s like rocket fuel. Now. You got all these labs everywhere, right, scientists looking for new drugs to fight cancer? Places breed all these lab rats just for experiments. That’s all the rats are good for. They wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for cancer.” A deep breath, reloading. “That’s the way it is between you and me. All this crap wrong with cities today, and small towns, the world at large? You people are like cancer, feeding on it with your cameras, poking your mikes into it, stirring it. Pretty soon, you just have to expect rats like me popping up to give you more to work with.”

“There’s nothing cancerous about meeting the public’s right to know. You’re making a perversity out of something inherently noble.”

“Keep thinking that, if it helps.” He chuckled. “Do you think pharmaceutical companies want to cure cancer? Not in a million years. They won’t wipe it out
because of economics
. Get rid of a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry? All they want is to cure some individual patients … and keep the hope alive in everyone else.” He settled back in his chair with a grin. “So save the self-righteousness. I may disgust you, and you may hate me. But your job would never be the same without me.”

“And how do you feel about the continuing cycle of murder? By now you must know about the copycat killer who started imitating you last month.”

Darryl’s forehead creased. “I feel honored,” he said slowly. “I influenced a stranger’s destiny.” A broad, dawning grin. “For once, I was the inspiration. The growth cycle continues.”

Fifty minutes later, once the interview was concluded, Sandra hurried to the nearest bathroom and hung over the toilet with dry heaves. She’d eaten nothing all day, but the rejection reaction was the same.

The following week — after editing, rearranging, splicing, and redubbing — the five-part series on Darryl Hiller was shown on the eleven o’clock news.

And drew the largest audience in
ActioNews 8
’s history.

*

November is the cruelest month, but
ActioNews 8
weathers it well. They’re top of the heap in a nine-station market, no small thanks due to Sandra Riley and her considerable drawing power. She’s now a weeknight anchor with a hefty salary kicked up into six figures, and management’s only cause for fretting is that her agent would contract her new position for no more than a year. She has to be free to jump when those inevitable network offers start to materialize.

The copycat Tapeworm gives them a body every few weeks. It’s not the original rapist-murderer; the DNA evidence he leaves behind proves that. Of the original, no one knows. But Tapeworm is as Tapeworm does, and the public tunes fearfully in, dreading another dose of reality, enthralled when they get it. Sandra anchors the footage shot in the field by a younger protégée who idolizes her, and every time, Sandra dies a little more inside. Remembering her role. But her makeup never runs.

The package arrives via courier one afternoon, brown paper wrapper, neatly handlettered and marked to her attention at
ActioNews 8
studios. No return address, but the paperwork was done across the country on the west coast.

She pops it into the VCR in her office — a larger one now, with windows — when she gets a free moment on this blustery November afternoon. She presses PLAY and sits.

The amateur filmmaker has rigged up a cheerful title card, reading
Sex, Death, and Videotape 2
. Sandra sits straighter and bites down on a knuckle as her eyes widen

and there he is, Darryl Hiller seated on a stool with nothing in the background but stark white. Medium close-up, chest and head and shoulders. The camera doesn’t move, as if tripod-mounted.

“There was so much I wanted to tell you before I left last June.” He gazes directly at her without blinking. “But you understand the situation. I know you do. You always do.

“There was a lot I didn’t understand when we did our interview. Not that I was wrong, I haven’t been wrong in years, I was just … incomplete. When I told you I had to go beyond to the next level, I had no idea. No idea. Remember how you asked me how I felt about inspiring someone to follow in my footsteps and I said it felt good? I found out it meant more than that. It meant there’d been a change in me. I wasn’t just a rat anymore, because I’d created something in my own image. He wouldn’t have existed without me. And that meant I’d just been upgraded to cancer.” He starts to grin, the only one who gets the joke. “That’s how I got away at the sentencing. They escorted me right out of that bathroom and took the cuffs off me themselves. Poor, poor Reggie Blaine. Innocent bystander. All I had to do was break one guy’s face and tell one lie.”