The Dead and the Dying (15 page)

Today

Joanna Mason

"You want a room?" asks the man, staring at me skeptically. "You're in luck. Come on in."

"Actually," I reply, "I'm not here for a room." Reaching into my jacket pocket, I pull out my police I.D. badge and hold it up for him to see. I guess there's no way he could possibly guess that, technically, my badge has been rescinded while I'm on temporary suspension. "I'm here on official business," I add, gilding the lie.

"Great," he sighs, stepping back and holding the door open. "I knew it was too good to be true. Two paying customers in a month would be a goddamn miracle. I don't think I'd two in
six
months for more than a decade."

Stepping inside, I'm immediately struck by the fusty smell of the place. I'm at a large, overbuilt-looking building in the suburbs, and it turns out that the place has been turned into a small hotel. Or at least, that was the intention, but the owners clearly haven't had much luck. It looks as if the interior decorations haven't been improved for decades, and there are suspicious damp patches on the ceiling, as if there's been water damage over the years. All told, it's probably the least inviting attempt at a hotel that I've ever seen. Even Norman Bates would feel bad about trying to offer rooms in a place like this.

"I can tell you for a fact that no-one's done anything wrong in any of my rooms," the guy says, pushing the door shut. "You wanna know how I know that?" He pauses, as if for effect. "Easy. I have so few paying guests, I have no trouble keeping tabs on them. Most of the time, it's just me and Rita Hayworth knocking about the place, so I can assure you, I have a very good memory of the handful of poor souls who ever come and spent a night here."

"That's good," I reply. "Maybe you can help me with something."

"I'm glad my economic pain can be of benefit to you," he continues, turning and limping through to the kitchen. Following him, I'm surprised to find a large white parakeet hopping about in a cage. "Don't mind Rita Hayworth," the guy says as he fills a kettle. "She's not the kind of bird that talks. She just stares. The only reason I keep her around is 'cause I like to hear a little noise in the building from time to time. Whenever one of the ghosts makes a racket in the middle of the night, I can just tell myself it's the parrot making the noise. That way, I can get back to sleep. It's amazing how easily the human mind can fool itself, huh?"

"I'm here as part of an investigation into an old case," I reply, trying to ignore the bird's beady eyes as it fixes its stare on me. "I know this is going to sound kind of strange, but I have reason to believe that a man might have hidden something in your hotel a long time ago, and that someone else might have come and found it more recently."

"It wasn't a fish, was it?"

I stare at him.

"There's been this weird fishy smell lately. It's probably just rat droppings in the vents, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was a rotten fish somewhere."

"It's a diary," I reply, hoping to get the conversation back onto a less surreal setting. "Actually, it's the diary of a man who committed a number of murders."

"You want tea?" he asks. "Coffee?"

"No, thanks." I wait for him to reply, but he seems busy setting out a cup and filled it with instant coffee.

"How far back are we talking?" he asks eventually.

"Twelve years."

"Huh." Walking over to a small desk in the corner of the room, he opens one of the drawers and fishes around until finally he pulls out a small black book. "I hate computers," he mutters. "I keep all my records manually. My son, he keeps telling me to get online and start advertising the hotel, but I prefer to rely on word of mouth, you know? Keeps things honest." He flicks through the pages of the book, as the kettle starts to boil on the stove. "So give me a date. Where am I aiming here? You might be surprised to learn that I'm not a mind-reader."

"Did a man named Sam Gazade ever stay here?" I ask, feeling a slight shudder at the mere mention of his name.

"Gazade? That seems familiar." He turns a couple of pages. "Twelve years ago? No, I don't see anything. Of course, I check people's I.D. when they take a room, but as long as they pay upfront, I've got no real inclination to go into detail. I believe that a man's business is his own, and that no-one else has a right to go nosing about. I know that's an unpopular point of view in the twenty-first century, but I'm sticking to my guns. Why do you wanna know, anyway? Who's this Gazade guy?"

Smiling, I realize that I seem to have found the only person in the entire city - hell, in the entire country - who doesn't know about Gazade. "He's just someone I'm looking into," I reply. "What about more recently? Have you had any suspicious guests in the past six months?"

"All my guests are suspicious," he mutters, turning to the back of the book. "The very act of booking a room in this crumbling old place is pretty suspicious, if you ask me. And in the past six months, I've had the grand total of..." He pauses, as if he's studying the figures closely, before setting the book down on the table. "One guest."

"Just one?" I ask, walking over and picking the book up.

"Dr. Alice Huston," he replies as he limps over to the stove and removes the kettle, before pouring some boiling water into a cup. "I remember her, not only because it was so rare to actually get a paying customer, but because she seemed so picky."

"In what way?"

"Never satisfied with her room," he says. "She was a real pain. I checked her into my best room, but after she'd been in there a couple of hours, she said she didn't like the view, so I moved her into another room. Half an hour after that, she said the bed was too hard and she wanted to try again. She ended up trying four rooms before she was satisfied. That's a third of the rooms in the whole goddamn hotel. She seemed nice enough, but she was just constantly switching rooms, like she was never quite happy, but she couldn't tell me what she wanted. Goddamn woman nearly drove me insane with her constant demands."

Staring at the name in the book, I realize that this must be the person I'm looking for. Still, it can't be this easy. The name must be fake. After all, why would anyone leave open even the slightest possibility that they might be tracked down? Unless they were so arrogant that they believed no-one else could ever come looking for Sam Gazade's diary, in which case I guess they wouldn't bother to take too many precautions.

"You wanna see the rooms?" the guy asks after a moment.

I shake my head. There doesn't seem to be any point. After all, the diary's obviously been retrieved, so there's not going to be anything else of interest in here. This Dr. Huston woman obviously changed rooms so many times because she wasn't sure which room, precisely, would contain the hidden diary. She eventually struck lucky in the fourth room, but if she hadn't, I guess she would have gone through every room in the hotel, probably driving the owner crazy in the process. Gazade must have picked this place to hide his diary precisely because he knew there was little chance of any of the rooms ever being too busy.

"You got any kind of surveillance system?" I ask, glancing up at the walls and realizing that I don't see any cameras. The whole place seems like it's stuck several centuries in the past.

"Oh yeah," he replies airily, taking a sip from his cup of coffee. "I've got state-of-the-art facial recognition and infra-red scanners. The same kinda stuff they use in casinos, you know?" He smiles. "The only surveillance system I bother with is my eyes. Dr. Huston was a decent-looking woman. Smart, tidy. Kinda young-looking, too. God knows what she was doing staying in a place like this, but I didn't poke too much. I think the world'd be a better place if we each kept out of one another's business." He pauses. "That said, I was a little worried she might be one of those broads who checks into a hotel and then checks out of life, if you know what I mean. I was kinda relieved when she came down for breakfast. It'd have been just my luck if my only paying customer in the past few years had been a suicide."

"Get a lot of those, do you?" I ask.

"I wish! At least they'd pay, and they wouldn't need food in the morning!"

"Did you get any I.D. from this Dr. Huston woman?" I continue.

"She paid by cash."

"State law requires -"

"State law can kiss my ass." He stares at me for a moment. "She paid in cash. Up-front. I'm not gonna scare away a paying customer just 'cause of some dumb law." He sniffs. "She sure seemed like she was genuine. She seemed smart, you know? She didn't do anything to make me doubt her."

"What about a phone number?"

He shrugs.

Turning, I watch as the parrot hops to the far side of its cage.

"You're not gonna get me fined, are you?" the guy continues. "I can't afford to pay a fine. I'm running on the edge as it is. Frankly, if someone tries to fine me, I'd rather just board up the doors and windows, load my rifle, and take a little target practice." He pauses. "I was kidding. I'm not that kind of crazy. I'm more relaxed. Until the zombie apocalypse, I'll keep my guns under lock and key."

"I'm not gonna get you fined," I say, tossing the book onto the table. "I don't care enough. But I might be back. This is a complex investigation."

"What did she do, anyway?" he asks as he follows me to the front door. "She seemed pretty high-class. She into something dodgy? Or was she murdered or something like that? She seemed in a pretty good mood when she left in the morning. Nothing about her struck me as being particularly noticeable, apart from the fact that she insisted I call her Dr. Huston. She was very particular about that, like Mrs. Huston or Ms. Huston wasn't good enough. She wanted her full title." He pauses. "So? What's she done? Or what's been done to her?"

"I don't know," I reply, stepping out onto the porch. "I'd never even heard of her until I came here to see you." Turning to him, I can see that he's desperate for me to throw him a bone. "You've been very helpful," I add. "I'd rather you didn't mention this to anyone, though. In the unlikely event that you bump into Dr. Huston again, I'd appreciate it if you could refrain from letting her know that I was asking after her. Also..." I pause for a moment. "If any other police officers come calling, there's no need to mention it to them, either. They won't come, but if they did, I'd appreciate it if you could keep a little quiet."

"You doing some work off the books?"

"Something like that."

"Do me a favor in return, yeah?" he continues. "Spread the word a little. Word of mouth, you know? If you happen to hear of anyone looking for a cheap, clean hotel room, I'd appreciate it if you could send 'em my way. All I need is a few good customers to kick-start things, and this place could really take off." He grabs some grubby-looking, faded brown business cards and shoves them into my hands. "Pass 'em out to anyone you meet, yeah? Talk the place up. Tell 'em we do really good breakfasts. It's true. Sure, the place might be a little faded, but I've never had a guest complain about my food yet."

"I'll keep it in mind," I reply, pocketing the cards before turning and walking away.

The truth is, I can't help thinking that this whole thing seems way too easy. There's no way someone would check in using their real name, not when they're looking for Sam Gazade's diary. Still, it's probably worth checking out this Dr. Huston person and seeing if she's a real person. After all, I might strike lucky. As I know from bitter experience, smart people make dumb mistakes all the time, and sometimes the smartest people make the dumbest mistakes of all.

Dr. Alice Huston

"What would you have done if I hadn't shown up last night?" I ask, watching as Paula hauls the last of the black sacks to the clearing. "Did you have a plan in mind?"

As she drops the sack next to the other two, Paula takes a step back. She's out of breath after having carried the old man's remains from the car, which is a shame since she's now got another job to do.

"Here," I say, holding the shovel out toward her. "You're going to have to do the honors. Make sure it's deep. There's a reason most graves are six feet. It's to stop animals digging the bodies up, so you'll need to put your back into it. The last thing you need is for some fox to bring the old guy back to the surface."

Taking the shovel, Paula looks around for a moment, as if she can't quite decide where to start digging. I swear to God, there's something deeply wrong with this girl. It's as if she veers constantly between anger and blankness; at the campus, she can be quite aggressive when she's defending her arguments, but right now it's as if she's in a complete daze. Then again, I guess I understand her predicament. After all, she believes she killed the old man, which has to be enough to knock her off-kilter. It's crazy to see how easily she's bought into the idea that she suffered some kind of blackout, but I guess she's learned over the years not to rely on her own senses.

"Tell me about yourself," I say, watching as she tentatively starts digging a grave in the forest floor. The truth is, I've already spent plenty of time looking into Paula's background, but I need to hear it all from her own lips. I need to know her version of the truth. "At the risk of sounding like a cliche, Paula, tell me about your parents."

She glances at me, and it's clear that's feeling uncomfortable.

"Tell me about your mother," I continue. "What's she like?"

"I live with her," she replies, struggling to break the hard, dry soil. "We live together."

"Just the pair of you?"

She nods. "During term-time I have a room in a shared house, but every vacation I go back to my mother's place in Chicago. I don't like leaving her there for too long. She's not very good at looking after herself, and I don't have any brothers or sisters."

"What's wrong with her?" I ask. "Alzheimer's?"

"Maybe. She's just a bit vague sometimes."

"And your father?"

"He left when I was a kid."

"Don't you have any contact with him?"

She lets out a gasp as she finally gets the head of the spade deep into the soil, and with great effort she manages to properly break ground for the first time.

"My father's not relevant to my life," she says eventually, as she continues to dig. She seems very calm and clinical, as if she's excised the man from her knife with surgical precision. "He made sure of that when he ran away with a younger woman and left my mother to raise me alone. It's his fault that..." She pauses for a moment, as if she's worried she's said too much. "He's a deadbeat," she adds eventually. "He's not a good person to have around. I'm lucky that he left and that my mother was able to raise me properly."

"When you say that he's a deadbeat -"

"He left my mother and started a new family somewhere else," she continues, with obvious bitterness in her voice. "He doesn't like us to mix. I've seen him a couple of times, but I've never met his new family. My mother says it's because he's ashamed of me, and she's probably right. He's just a misogynistic asshole and he doesn't deserve to be treated like a real person. He's worse than shit."

I smile as she continues to dig. That little speech about her father was too neat, and too well-rehearsed, to be natural. In fact, I can't shake the feeling that it must have been drilled into her from an early age. I know I shouldn't draw too many early conclusions, but it's clear that someone has done a number on this girl's head, leaving her with some serious emotional issues. I suspected that she was troubled, and that's why I started following her and coming up with a plan to use her difficulties for my own ends, but I'm still shocked by just how badly damaged she seems to be. It's a wonder she can function in society at all.

"Your secret's safe with me, you know," I continue. "If I was going to call the police or report what you did in any way, I'd have done it by now. I wish I could have got there in time to stop you, but I wasn't quick enough. Still, maybe it would have been wrong of me to interfere. I want to be more of an observer than a participant, Paula. I guess my background in sociological study means that I like to watch other people doing things, rather than getting dirty myself."

"It's fine," she murmurs, putting most of her effort into the task of digging a grave. It's clear that she's struggling, and that she's not used to manual labor, but I'm enjoying watching her determined perseverance. Despite all her flaws, she seems to have a degree of inner strength, and I'm starting to think that I was right when I saw her potential. She's everything I need, and more. It's little short of a miracle that such a pliable young woman has wandered into my path at such an opportune time. If I didn't know better, I'd suspect that divine intervention had delivered this dark little angel into my hands.

"Why have you been killing people?" I ask.

She stops and turns to me. "I haven't been -"

"You've killed three people," I say, interrupting her. "Don't deny it, Paula. I've been keeping an eye on you and I know exactly what you've done. First you killed a man named Edward Hunter, and then you killed a man named Patrick Donnelly, and then last night you killed Sam Pressman. Don't even try to claim that you didn't, Paula. I watched you all three times, and in case you haven't noticed, you're digging Mr. Pressman's grave as we speak."

Looking down at the hole she's managed to dig so far, Paula seems momentarily stunned, as if she can't quite work out what's happening to her. Still, in her addled state, she seems to be at least considering the possibility that she might have been committing these murders. As soon as I saw the drugs she was taking for her emotional problems, I knew that she'd be experiencing periods of fuzzy recall, and sure enough I'm finding it pathetically easy to instill dark ideas to bridge the gaps in her consciousness.

"You don't remember?" I ask.

"I don't see how I could forget something like that," she says uncertainly.

"But you believe me, don't you?"

She pauses, and it's clear that I haven't quite sealed the deal yet.

"What is it about Sam Gazade that interests you so much?" I ask.

"Gazade? He..." she pauses for a moment.

"You're recreating his murders," I continue. "You're going through them one by one, and you're recreating them with absolute precision, except you're changing the genders. He killed women, and you're killing men. Plus, Sam Pressman's not part of the chain. He's an extra death, but Hunter and Donnelly's deaths were perfect copies of everything that Gazade did twelve years ago." I walk over and look down into the shallow ditch that she's managed to dig so far. "It's just that your victims have penises, whereas his had vaginas. That makes me wonder about you, Paula. It's as if you're trying to make some kind of point about gender, or maybe you're just filled with hatred for men, but either way, there's no doubt about it."

"I haven't killed anyone," she says, as if she's trying to convince herself. "I swear..."

"You've not only killed them," I continue, realizing that I just need to apply a little more pressure. "You've also tortured them. You've been copying Sam Gazade's work to the letter, and you've been putting your victims through the same ordeals that he invented for his victims all those years ago."

"No," she mutters. "It's not true. You're -"

"I'm telling you the absolute, honest truth," I reply. "Why would I lie, Paula? Why would I say all these things if they weren't true?" I pause for a moment, watching as she struggles to come to terms with everything I'm saying. "It's okay," I continue eventually. "You're not alone. I'm here to help you, and it's going to be okay. All you need to do is finish digging this grave and make sure that the old man's body is buried deep. Once that's done, we'll go back to my home and talk, okay? I need to know what you're intending to do next. I actually think that we could help one another. Some of my work has been veering into the kind of territory that you're occupying, Paula. Let's not forget that, at the end of the day, I'm your teacher. Perhaps I should start teaching you a few important things."

"I'm not..." she says, seemingly starting to panic. "I mean, I didn't do any of this!" Dropping the spade, she turns to run, but I grab her arm and pull her back toward me. "I didn't do it!" she shouts, with tears in her eyes. "I didn't, I couldn't, I... There's no way. I'm not a murderer... Not really... I know I went into the old man's house, but I was testing myself. I wouldn't have actually done anything..."

"Yes," I say firmly, grabbing her shoulder and pushing her down to her knees. "You did it all, Paula. You decided to copy Sam Gazade's murders, and you swapped the genders for whatever sordid little reason you've managed to cook up. I saw you at the prison the other night, when Gazade was supposed to be executed. I saw you checking out books on his case from the campus library, and I know you have his diary."

She stares at me. I can tell that she's struggling to believe such an absurd claim, but she
will
believe it. She's deeply damaged, and she's on drugs for depression and anxiety, and all of this means that I can take advantage of her and twist her mind until she believes whatever I want her to believe. By the end of this, she'll be convinced that she killed the three men who've already been murdered, and her fingerprints will be all over the remains of the next victims.

"You're a very smart girl," I continue. "You managed to find a code in Gazade's testimony -"

"No!" she shouts, dropping the spade and stepping away from the half-dug grave. "You're lying!"

"Then what were you doing in Sam Pressman's house last night?" I ask. "Why were you creeping up to his room with a knife in your hand? For fun? For a prank? I saw you, Paula."

"That was a mistake," she says. "I was just... I wanted to see..."

She pauses, and finally I see, in her eyes, the moment when her soul breaks. She knows that she was in Pressman's house, and from that simple fact she's starting to believe everything else I'm telling her. It's almost as if I'm reaching into her head and rewiring her thought processes. A normal person could never be persuaded to believe that she was a serial killer, but Paula Clarke most certainly isn't normal.

"Keep digging," I say after a moment. "You need to get that grave dug, or I can't promise to help you."

As she takes the shovel and resumes her work, I can't help but feel a little proud of my work. Paula's going to take the blame for everything I've done so far, and for everything I'm going to do next, and the best part of the whole thing is that the poor little bitch is going to be absolutely convinced of her own guilt.