The Killing Vision (3 page)

Not that he hadn’t had chances.  There had been
several women in and out of his life over the years, and one or two that he had
briefly considered marrying.  But the nature of his work kept him from getting
in too deep with anyone.  After observing day in and day out what people did to
each other, you got a kind of apathy toward life.  You learned to turn off that
part of yourself that needed an emotional attachment.  You became an animal of
sorts—eating, sleeping, working.  And once a woman realized that about you, she
gave up and moved on to something else.  Besides, the crazy hours he worked
didn’t leave him much time for a social life. 

He took a swig of his beer and felt the coldness
spread through his belly.  Christ, when was the last time he’d been with a
woman?  Eight months?  A year?  He couldn’t remember.  Occasionally he found
himself sniffing around after Camron, the dispatcher at the station; she was
Hispanic—dark-skinned and green-eyed with legs that looked as though they might
squeeze the breath out of you if they were wrapped around your waist.  He
smiled at that; when he fantasized, he usually thought of Camron.  Lonely as he
sometimes was though, women just complicated things.  Period.  As jealous as he
might be of John Chapman, he knew he was happier the way he was. 

No commitments.  That was the way to go.  He drank
to it.

The cell phone rang next to his bed, and he picked
it up after the first ring.

“Mike?  It’s Scotty.”

Halloran took a drag off his cigarette.  “What’cha
got?”

“Well, she was strangled before her throat was cut.”

Halloran blew out a stream of smoke.  “Christ.”

“And there’s something else.  I’ve been looking at
some tissue samples…”

“Yeah?” 

“I’ve never seen anything like it.  I’m gonna call
in my friend from the state, have him come take a look just to be sure.”

Damn, Scotty could be vague sometimes. “For God’s
sake, Scotty, what’re you talking about?”

Scotty’s voice was hard.  “I was wrong about the
time of death.  She’s probably been dead for quite a while—maybe since she
disappeared.  But she’s only been exposed for about four days.  That’s based on
insect larva found in her mouth and other orifices.”

Halloran clinched his teeth on the butt of the
cigarette.  “What are you saying, Scotty?”

“Her body’s been kept refrigerated.  Probably
frozen.”

Friday, July 6

3:23 AM

Joel sat in the dilapidated recliner in the living
room, watching the lightning flash outside.  An hour ago, the power had gone
out, leaving the house in utter darkness.  He had awoke in the sudden blackness
and fumbled for the battery-powered weather radio in the bedside drawer, and
when he was sure there were no tornadoes heading his way, he tried to go back
to sleep.  But the crashing thunder kept rousing him, and he finally got out of
bed and shuffled to the living room to wait out the storm.

Sometimes he wished during one of these big storms
that the wind would just suck up this house where he had grown up and
everything in it—the furniture, the knick-knacks, the memories.  He hated the
place.  He hated the old life it represented, the way things were before his
mother and stepfather got killed.  It was as if the house had held on to all
the hate and oppression and now leached it back out like some deadly radiation,
a force that had weakened him so that he could never get away from it.

Mama and his stepfather Clifton had been dead for
five years now.  They had been killed when Clifton had pulled in front a train
at a crossing in town.  The stupid bastard.  He had been trying to outrun it,
to save a couple of minutes, but he had misjudged the distance.  The freight
train, hauling seventy-three loaded coal cars, had slammed into the pickup
truck and dragged it a mile before it could stop.  Mama and Clifton were both
dead at the scene.

In a way, it was a relief.  The fucker was dead.  He
could never hurt anyone anymore.

Clifton Roberts had come into their lives when Joel
was three and Wade was seven.  Their real father, Paul Coffman, had died a year
earlier in a mining accident.  Mama seemed to waste no time in finding another
man; hell, she knew she
needed
a man if she and the boys were to
survive.  She and Clifton dated a few weeks and were married one day on
Clifton’s lunch hour.  By the time she discovered the monster he really was, he
had already adopted the boys and taken control of all their lives.  It was too
late.

When Joel was ten, Clifton lost his job at the
quarry.  As time passed with no other job prospects in sight and money becoming
tighter, Clifton grew increasingly irritable, increasingly violent.  Any cross
word or transgression by the boys, no matter how unintentional, resulted in
immediate and merciless punishment. 

Clifton’s favorite method was surprise. He would
come at you without warning, without any indication that you were a target. 
The first time Joel could remember was when he had spilled his milk at the
dinner table.  Clifton stood up and slapped Joel so hard that he fell out of his
chair. 

“Clean that mess up,” Clifton spat.  “You know how
expensive milk is.  We’re barely makin’ it, and you go spill all that.”

With the side of his head stinging in pain, Joel got
to his feet and grabbed a dishcloth from the kitchen counter.  He sopped at the
milk, tears streaming down his cheeks.

“Stop that goddamn blubberin’.”

Carefully, Joel wiped up the rest of the milk.

“Now sit down and eat.”

Joel looked at his empty glass.  “Can I get some
more milk?”

Rage flared in Clifton’s eyes.  “Hell, no.  You’re
gonna have to do without.”

The hatred, the anger in that voice pierced Joel to
his very core, and the tears started up again.

Suddenly, Clifton was on his feet, pulling his belt
from around his waist.  “I said
stop that!
”  The belt came cutting through
the air with a whistle, striking the side of Joel’s head.  He screamed and fell
to the floor.  He lay on the hard floor like a slug, his mind spinning toward a
circle of black.  Mama had not moved an inch, had not uttered a word of
protest.

When Clifton found work, the tension over money
subsided, but Clifton’s violence remained.  Wade and Joel were often whipped
with the belt, sometimes so hard that whelps were left on their skin for days. 

Joel began to put on weight in his teens; he’d never
understood why, since he was active and healthy.  In any event, Clifton’s
random punishments grew more frequent, more violent.  Clifton seemed to hate
the sight of him.

Not long after his sixteenth birthday, Joel was
heading through the house toward his room when Clifton grabbed his arm.  It had
been almost a year since he’d discovered his strange ability, and Joel had
learned to steel himself against the torrent of sensation, both physical and
mental.  Most of his encounters were the result of accidentally brushing into
someone, catching a fleeting thought like a short blast from a passing radio. 
This was different. 

The sensations rushing through him from Clifton were
black and brutal, a wave of hatred so strong it nearly knocked Joel to the
floor.  A roar flooded his head, a mixture of screams both male and female that
morphed into one agonizing wail that was asexual and almost harmonic,
terrifying yet strangely beautiful.  Images streaked past his vision—blood and
naked limbs, Mama’s face twisted in agony.  Then, somewhere in the midst of the
seizure, a tiny spark of pain ignited and began to grow.  It loomed before him,
drowning out all his other senses, a pain so intense, so sickening that it
penetrated every fiber of his being.  And then the words exploded into his
head, Clifton’s voice yet not Clifton’s voice but the voice of the devil
(YOU
FILTHY STINKIN’ PIG FUCKIN’ QUEER BASTARD SHOW YOU HOW FAT QUEERS LIKE IT)
and
the pain!  The pain was excruciating.  And then he realized that Clifton was
gripping his testicles, crushing his balls in his filthy, nicotine-stained
fingers and Joel was screaming and crying but there was no one there.  Mama was
gone.  Wade was gone.  They were alone in the house.

And then, miraculously, Clifton let go, leaving Joel
to writhe on the floor in pain, clutching his bruised testicles as wave after
wave of nausea washed over him.  He fought against the urge to vomit.  Clifton
was looming over him, his voice drawn out and slow as he said, “The next time
you play with yourself, I’ll cut the goddamn thing off.”  He stomped out of the
room, his worn leather workboots scuffing the wood floor.

Joel did not know what to think.  It was the one
incident he had never spoken to anyone about.

Throughout all of this time, through all of Clifton’s
violent and unexpected outbursts, Mama seemed to ignore everything.  Joel had
hugged her once after he attained his ability and saw that she was deathly
afraid of Clifton.  She was terrified of what he might do to the boys, but she
was more fearful of what he would do to
her
.  He had seen everything—unspeakable
acts of perversion in the solace of their bedroom, sudden eruptions of anger
and humiliation—all directed at her.  He had been simultaneously outraged and
sickened.  Though at first he couldn’t understand why their mother refused to
take up for them, he finally understood.  It was all there in her head.  She
was afraid he would kill her,
knew
he would kill her if she dared take a
stand against him. 

He had wondered countless times how different things
would have been had their real father not died, if Clifton had never shown up
to tear their lives to shreds.  But it was pointless to think about that.  The
past was the past, and there was nothing about it that could be changed.

Now, as the lightning flashed and the thunder grew
distant, Joel lit a cigarette and let it smolder in the blackness, dangling
from his fingers, his feet drawn up in the chair.  He was not surprised that
his cheeks were wet with tears.  He rarely thought of Clifton without crying. 

He sucked on the cigarette and stared at the
blackness outside the windows.  The rain had stopped, but the lightning
continued to flash, brilliant bursts of light that showed the sky to be a
whirling, boiling gray mass.

* * *

10:45 AM

“All right, so explain this to me again.”

Scotty swiped a sweaty fan of gray hair off his
forehead and laid a computer-printed photograph on top of the clutter on his
desk.  “This is a microscopic picture of the McElvoy girl’s skin cells.  The
tissue is damaged.  Not in a normal way.  This is how cells look after a body
has been subjected to extremely cold temperatures.  The kind of cells we find
when somebody’s frozen to death, after the cells have died and then thawed.”

Halloran shot a glance at Chapman, then looked back
at Scotty.  “But the temperature hasn’t been below sixty probably since she
disappeared.”

“I know.”

Chapman took the picture of the cells from Halloran
and studied it.  The reddish-pink ovals were ringed with rough brown outlines. 
“So are you saying that somebody killed this girl, kept her body frozen, and
then just dumped her in the river a couple of days ago?”

“So it would seem.”

“For what purpose?”

Scott shrugged.  “Who knows?”

Halloran blew out a breath and reached for his
cigarettes.

“You know you can’t smoke in here, Mike,” said
Scotty.

“Come on,” Halloran said, cramming the pack back
into his shirt pocket, “you’re stressing me out here.  Don’t you have anything else
that might help us?”

Scotty shook his head.  “I wish I had more.  There’s
not even anything under her fingernails.  They’ve been scraped.  Probably by
whoever killed her.”

Chapman leaned forward.  “Any prints from where she
was strangled?”

“No.  Perp wore gloves, apparently.  I tried to
determine the size of his hands from the bruises, but that was inconclusive.”

“What about DNA?” asked Halloran.  “Any saliva? 
Surely there’s blood or semen.”

“Nothing.”  He stopped.

“What?”

Scotty cleared his throat.  “She was violated with
some object.  Something blunt and wooden.  There were splinters in the vaginal
walls.  It was done after she was dead.”

Chapman blew out a sigh.  Halloran glanced at him,
then stared above Scotty’s head at the anatomical charts on the wall.  “Do you
think that this guy kept her for a while so he could…”  He couldn’t bring
himself to say what he was imagining.

“Yes,” Scotty said without hesitation.  “That’s
exactly what I think.”

Halloran rubbed his dry lips, wanting—
needing
—a
smoke.  “Holy Christ.”

* * *

11:35 AM

Marla sat at the kitchen table, staring out the
screen door to the back yard, across the overgrown field, to the woods beyond. 
Before her sat a full, untouched cup of lukewarm coffee.  Beside it a small
piece of notepaper lay unfolded displaying a penciled phone number.  On top of
the paper, holding it flat, was Wade’s Smith & Wesson thirty-eight
revolver, fully loaded.