The Hundredth Man (33 page)

“Ava’s voice,” I said, staring into the snow. “See if you can find tracking.”

Harry jiggered a knob and the picture resolved into a close-up of bloody, gloved hands lifting a stomach from an open abdomen. The camera zoomed out, framing Ava as she worked, her hands inside the body. I recognized it as Deschamps’s corpse.

“.. . contents sparse, gruel like indicative of…”

“What the hell is going on, Cars? What would anyone want with tapes of people getting cut into?”

I fast-forwarded. Deschamps’s body, different angle; nothing more than the same autopsy shot from a different camera. I popped a second cassette into the player. Same thing, Nelson’s body, not yet into the cutting.

“This guy gets off on autopsy movies?” Harry said. “Is that what this is about? Killing people to watch them get cut up?”

“There’s more, Harry. The words mean something in all this.”

I fast-forwarded. Several angles again. Lindy’d been playing with the controls as the tape recorded; some shots were skintight close, others distant, Ava and the corpse from knees to neck. Farther into the tape was more of the same. Lindy had pulled input from three cameras and dumped it all on this tape. Editing.

The third cassette was the same, only the body was Burlew.

“Three bodies, three tapes of scenes edited from the cameras above the table,” I said, picking up the final cassette. “Let’s try tape number four.”

The cassette had a small star scratched on the case. I jacked it into the player. The machine clicked and whirred. The screen started black. A black-and-white mouth gradually took shape in the dark. The contrast had been punched up to full, the lips almost a moving abstraction. Opening and closing. Wet. Talking. A whisper.

Will Lindy’s voice.

“Don’t do that. It’s dirty and you’re not allowed. I’m telling my mama,” he said, his voice a mixture of pleading and admonition. Distorted music flowed beneath his words.

“Oh, please … stop touching me. Help me, Mama. She’s here.”

The scene cut to a woman’s fingers sliding down a man’s chest, kneading and stroking, teasing over a bicep, caressing a rounded shoulder. The camera zoomed in to an extreme close-up and Ava’s fingers played across a nipple. Lindy moaned and his voice increased in volume.

“She’s here, Mama. The bad girl. Touching me everywhere.”

The scene switched to another angle, one of the ceiling-mounted cameras above and slightly left of Ava, a quarter view from the back of her head. The field of view condensed as Ava’s hands trickled down the abdomen and across the flat belly, stopping at the pubic hair. She stroked it. Pressed on it. Put her hands beside the base of the penis.

The camera angle shifted and became more oblique.

Stunned and breathless, we watched Ava lean forward and began fella ting the corpse of Jerrold Nelson.

CHAPTER 33

T
he fat tires of the big ATV sank in a mudhole, spun, then bit. The machine skidded sideways before roaring toward the river. Less than a mile to go. His truck now rested at the bottom of a creek north of Chickasaw. A beautiful day, purple-gray clouds and sheets of lovely concealing rain. He cut around a fallen limb and jumped a soft hummock, rising from the seat to let his knees absorb the shock.

Behind him, strapped above the rear fenders, he heard Mama moan lightly. The sleep drug was beginning to wear off. He’d put it in her coffee and when she’d gotten disoriented steered her out the loading dock and into his car. The drug would be vaporizing in her body now he knew this from personal trials and she’d breathe it quickly away as she awakened. He had to hurry, an angry Mama was a very dangerous Mama.

In the distance he saw the cluster of trees keeping his boat from casual view. No one would find them. He would talk with Mama about the bad things that had happened in the past, then show her what he had become.

He would save her.

He had to cut the bad girl out. He was strong enough to do it now.

The clouds swirled like dark ghosts and the rain fell harder. Will Lindy aimed for the trees and pressed forward through the flailing rain. It was a beautiful day.

“My God,” Harry exclaimed, as we watched Ava’s jaws move back and forth, up and down. “Is she doing what I think?”

“Yes. She’s reading, “Warped a quart of whores, warped, whores,” over and over.”

Ava appeared to change her facial shape and rhythm. Harry said, “It’s different. Now she’s reading “

““Rats. Rats. Rats. Rats.”” I said. “Or “Ho ho ho ho.””

“Without hearing her voice it looks like …”

“I know. And remember, I’m standing almost next to her, barely out of camera range.”

Harry whispered to himself while holding his chin. “He selected words that swing the jaw.”

The writing made sense now. Lindy wanted to Ava to mi mick the facial motions of oral sex as she leaned close to read the tiny, faint writing, her head concealing where an erect penis would be. From the high angle the motions were slight, but suggestive. He had edited between multi angled shots of Nelson’s and Deschamps’s almost identical lower abdomens to extend the scene, then looped it over and over. Ava’s head bobbed, her jaw moved faster, then slower, as Lindy’s wet moans poured into the room. His arousal didn’t sound faked.

The scenes had been filtered to reduce clinical reality, the whites blazing, the shadows dark and muddy. Beneath it all were the music and eerily distorted sound effects, a throbbing and scratching to haunt a saint’s nightmares.

Lindy’s moans increased in speed and volume as Ava’s head began bobbing furiously. I realized she had been leaning away from reading the inscription and he had reversed and fast-forwarded her motion repeatedly.

Lindy produced a blanketing orgasmic moan and the screen went black. A high-pitched squeal blasted from the speakers and Harry jumped. The video started again with close-ups of the dissection: scalpel slashing, gloved hands retrieving organs through the red slit.

Harry said, “Uh-oh.”

Ava’s voice: “Willy? Willet Liindy.”

I was right. Lindy had cobbled his name together from individual words and syllables. Were the other words just distraction, chaff? I held my breath and listened in horrified fascination.

“Will Lindy?” Ava said.

Lindy spoke with a child’s voice. “Yes, Mama?”

“You were with that girl again, weren’t you?” Ava’s voice was slow and monotonous, computer-voiced in its inflections, a verbal patch-work from Burlew’s back.

“I didn’t want to, Mama.”

“She makes bad things inside of you, doesn’t she?” The flatness of Ava’s voice charged the words with despair.

“I won’t see her ever again. Promise.”

“Willet, Willet, Willet … you know how the bad girl makes you lie.”

“No, this time I mean it. I said I promise.”

“We have to make sure, Will.”

“No.” Quivering.

“Time to get the bad things out, Will.” A hand sliding into the wet cavity. It squeezed and kneaded.

“Don’t hurt me again, Mama.”

I wondered if this was how it might actually have been: Lindy’s voice frantic and frightened, Mama’s voice dull and mechanical, a terrified child versus an insane robot. One moment she’s the Bad Girl, the next, she’s Mama.

“She’s deep in you, Will. Mama has to get her out.”

“No, please. Please don’t, Mama.”

The gloved hands sliced and pulled. Scene dissolved into scene. A liver. Kidneys. Bladder. They glistened under the light, like mutant fruit. Most of the scenes were so close the stump of neck wasn’t in the frame. When it was, I figured the identity-deleting beheadings must have allowed Lindy’s fevered mind to simply fit his own head in place.

Harry spoke as softly as if in church. “Think she really cut into him?”

I said, “Maybe that’s what he imagined when she was pumping his insides full of whatever.”

“Did the woman crawl up from hell?” Harry asked, watching a lung emerge into the light.

“Horror crawled down through generations.”

Lindy’s voice moved up a register. “It hurts so bad, Mama.”

“Pain makes us pure, Will.”

The screen went black and quiet and the silence seemed total. Then Lindy’s voice returned; older, cynical.

“I know something, Mama.”

“What do you know?”

“I know a secret, Mama.” The voices had been stereo-phonically channeled, Ava’s voice coming from the right, Lindy’s from the left.

“What do you know, Will?”

“Secrets, secrets.” Taunting.

“What do you know, Will?”

Whispered: “You’re the bad girl.”

“What did you say, Willy?”

“I know you’re the bad girl, Mama.” He laughed, a voice thickened with lust. “Secrets, secrets. So many secrets.”

Harry said, “Whatever’s shaking out, it ain’t gonna be good.”

“You … just … shut up … now … Will Lindy.”

“You’re the bad girl, Mama, you’re the bad girl, Mama, I know a secret … “

Lindy’s singsong rant pitched headlong into a scream that cut the air like a scythe, then shivered into black. There was only the whirr of the VCR as over a minute’s time a body slowly appeared on the screen, surfacing from a coal-black sea. Nelson’s body. The color was completely washed away, leaving only black and white and shape-shifting gray. The camera panned to a bicep, zoomed in close.

“Watch what I can do, Mama, watch me do this” Lindy’s voice was a taunting whisper.

Nelson’s bicep was replaced by Deschamps’s arm in the same position, larger, thicker.

“I’m growing, Mama. Look.”

Nelson’s flat stomach turned into the more muscled abdomen of Deschamps. Nelson’s thigh became the thicker thigh of Deschamps.

“Uh-oh, Mama,” Lindy’s voice challenged, “you better watch out now.”

Nelson’s shoulders ballooned as if by magic, gaining weight and definition.

“My God,” Harry said. “It’s a revenge fantasy.”

Ava/ Mama cobbled-together words: “Don’t, Will. You’re scaring me. Don’t scare me.”

“You think you’re scared now, Mama, watch this.” Triumph rang in Lindy’s voice.

The screen went dark and the eerie sounds grew deeper and more rhythmic. The screen lightened to a shot of Burlew’s power lifter body, thick and defined, the boulder chest, the ham biceps. Then a montage of the body from several angles. Dozens of shots squeezed into a few seconds, the camera zooming in as though drawn against the body.

“No. Will. Don’t. I’m scared.”

“It’s your turn now, Mama.”

A close-up of lips recalled the beginning of the video: Lindy’s wet mouth spitting out words: “Did you ever think I’d come for you, Mama?”

Ava’s voice contorted through a mishmash of jammed-together vowels, an ugly choking sound, the ees from “Pee.” The hollow o’s of “Boston.” The long o’s of “Kokomo.” The city names had provided both needed syllables and a diversion.

“.. . ahhhh-oooaa-uu … Don’t … please …”

A cut to Lindy’s face, half in dark, a wild grin beneath blazing eyes, his hands gesturing the viewer into the picture.

“… oo … ahh … oooaauuhh …”

“Pain makes us pure, Mama.”

“.. . eeee-aa-ooo-ahhh … Will…”

“I will save you, Mama.”

“.. . oooooaaaaeee “

The screen abruptly snapped into black and the sound cut off. A white hiss of blank tape filled the room.

Harry said, “What happened? The tape bust?”

“No,” I said slowly, my mind watching another set of invisible lines push from the dark. “It’s lacking the final scene. The climax.”

“Mama’s death.”

“Damn you, Jeremy. Damn you to hell and back,” I whispered at the empty screen, suddenly knowing why I’d escaped his room unscathed.

Harry said, “What, Carson?”

“Jeremy couldn’t see who the killer was, but he saw who it wasn’t,” I said, recalling Jeremy’s study of the police reports and interviews, his pinpoint-focus mind deciphering the minutia. I heard him rant at Ava when she’d suggested his input had saved lives.

“You see it as saving lives, witch. I see it as BETRAYING JOEL ADRIAN!”

I recalled the ease with which he manipulated me toward the innocent Caulfield, and the willingness with which I went.

I said, “Jeremy read the material and discovered or suspected the killer was on a mother-dominated mission of revenge or whatever. My brother saw the killer as a kindred spirit. He also saw that Caulfield didn’t fit the mindset.”

Comprehension dawned in Harry’s eyes. “So Jeremy aimed you at Caulfield to give the real killer time to fulfill his mission, to put Mama in the movie. Jeremy didn’t burn you because …”

I nodded. “Because he didn’t fulfill his end of the bargain. He misdirected me instead.”

“And now Lindy’s somewhere with … Mama,” Harry whispered. “Completing the fantasy.”

I slammed my fist against the table, a gesture as futile as wafting off a storm with a paper fan.

“What will Lindy do?” Harry said. We sat in the car with no idea of direction. I braced my feet on the floor and tumbled twenty years back. Threat. Storm. What to do? Daytime: Run to the oak in the woods, climb to my fort. Wait. Night: Slide out the window, creep to the car.

I knew what he’d do: It was in me too.

“He’ll go where he feels safe, Harry his version of a tree-house. I’ve got to find out what that is.”

“Will he race to to finish the movie?”

“He’s never rushed anything. We’ve got that.”

Was I lying to myself? But Lindy had spent hundred of hours stalking his victims, combing through videotape, selecting scenes, stitching them into a five-minute crazy-quilt of retribution. No. He’d want his moment of confrontation to linger. As long as he felt safe. That meant no standoffs, no rushing attacks, no SWAT teams roaring up in a scream of lights and sirens and bullhorns. That would only accelerate his mad agenda. Yet when it was finished I suspected he could run laughing into a hail of fire and metal, pain and death nothing more than pixels on a TV screen.

But first we had to find him. What had Ms. Clay said? No. What had Mrs. Benoit said?

Bows.

Bows. I recalled Mrs. Benoit’s growing turmoil as we talked with her niece. Bows. She’d gotten excited whenever someone had said Lindy’s name. Said, bows. Or something. “Back to the motel, Harry,” I said. “Crank it,” I added, needlessly.