The Soul Hunter (37 page)

“You did?”

“She lives in Shreveport. She really liked you a lot. She told me. She showed me the picture of homecoming.”

“I guess she recognized me.”

“Drew?”

He nodded. “That must be why she called. Because she recognized me.”

“At Finn’s house. Right?”

John nodded. “And at that place where she…”

“Worked? You saw her where she worked? At Caligula?”

He wiped his nose on his sleeve and looked at the janitor again, who looked back at him, his shriveled face serene, unruffled. John looked down at the floor. His shoulders started to shake and tears dripped off his face and onto the linoleum.

“John, hey,” I said. “Lots of men go to…those places. I mean, it’s not the Middle Ages. No one’s going to burn you at the stake or anything. Did she see you?” I asked. “At Caligula?”

“That’s why she called me.”

“You’re sure she saw you? Did you talk to her?”

He nodded. “On the phone. Later.”

“She called you and you called her back.”

He nodded. “She was going to blackmail me.”

“She said that? She used the word blackmail?”

“All I did was call her back. I never should have called her back. She wanted me to meet her. To talk.”

“Did she tell you why, though, John?”

“She wanted to blackmail me.”

I was still light-headed. I sank to the floor, my back to the wall, and sighed. “John, I don’t think she was blackmailing you. She wasn’t that sort of person. When did you see her at Caligula?”

“Thursday night.”

“You saw her on Thursday night? You’re sure?”

“That’s why she called. She saw me. She recognized me.”

“John, she called you before that. Thursday afternoon.”

He sniffed loudly and looked up at me.

“What?”

“The message is dated Thursday. Not Friday.” I reached into my pocket and produced the message, holding it up to show him.
It was smeared with the blood from my fingers. “See? The twelfth, 2:08 p.m. Maybe you got it on Friday. But the message came in on Thursday afternoon. Marci’s very good about that.”

He nodded in mute agreement. Marci’s accuracy was indeed legendary.

“Did you ever go to Caligula before?”

He shook his head. “I never go to the same place twice.”

“Really? Are there that many to choose from?”

He nodded.

I sighed again. The truth was getting uglier by the minute. “Did you meet with her?”

He nodded.

“Saturday night?” I asked.

He nodded.

“You met her in the alley, didn’t you? Behind the car place.”

“The pawn shop. Next door.”

“And that was when she asked you for money?”

He nodded. “I got so mad.” He started to cry again, huge, long drippy tears.

“And the ax?”

“I had it in my trunk. In case…”

The fight went out of us both then. At that moment, I felt like I might never live again. Not like a normal person. Not like I used to.

John groaned. I watched the arrogance deflate, the defensiveness wither. He looked up at me, meeting my eyes, for once, his face soggy, sorry. “I didn’t mean it. I just got so mad.”

“John, we have to call the police and tell them what happened.”

I looked up at the janitor, who nodded and left.

John shuddered and kept crying.

“John, did you know she was pregnant? Did you give her a chance to tell you that?”

His blue eyes widened. They were bloodshot and sodden, his lumpy cheeks sticky, grimy.

“She was? It wasn’t mine.”

“I know that, John. She was probably going to ask you for help. Her whole life, her mother has told her you were the nicest person she’s ever met. She needed help. That’s all. She wouldn’t have blackmailed you. She just needed some money.”

John’s shoulders started to heave. He balled himself up like a child, his head on his knees, and sobbed.

“I didn’t know,” he kept saying.

“I know you didn’t.”

“I just got so mad.”

I heard a door open. I limped to the doorway as Helene emerged from the office at the end of the hall. I motioned for her to come. She stepped into John’s office, her eyes sweeping around the room taking it all in, and listened as I explained the situation. As I talked, she walked to the sink, grabbed some paper towels and clamped them over the cuts on my hands. I’d forgotten that I was bleeding.

As the clinic began to buzz with weekend activity, campus security escorted two DPD cops into the clinic, along with a couple of paramedics. Helene sat with me in the hallway while the paramedics bandaged my hands and my knees and the cops secured the scene. The cuts were painful now. My neck throbbed.

Helene turned to me and sighed. “Well, I guess you got him off your committee.”

“Not funny, Helene.”

“You’re right. I shouldn’t have said that. But he wasn’t the person we thought he was, was he?”

“No. He wasn’t.”

McKnight and Jackson showed up then. They stood and shook their heads as I told them what happened. I wasn’t sure if it was anger or disbelief I saw on their faces—both, I guess.

“You’re lucky he didn’t kill you,” McKnight said to me.

“I know.”

“You’re going to need stitches,” Jackson said, pointing at my injuries. “I told you not to be a hero.”

“I know.”

“We’ll need to talk to the janitor,” Jackson said. He turned to the security guard. “Where is he?”

The guard shrugged. “Never saw a janitor.”

“Isn’t he the one that called you?” McKnight asked.

“It was some lady from Chicago. She said her kid was upset and wanted us to check the clinic. We got here right when the cops arrived.”

Jackson asked me for a description of the janitor. I gave it to him, knowing they’d never find him.

Earl, Christine Zocci’s angel, had intervened on my behalf once before. He’d been dressed as a hotel porter that time, not a janitor. But his ancient face, black as the night sea and just as old, had worn the same winsome, wise expression. I’d recognized him the instant I laid eyes on him.

Two uniformed cops led a weeping John Mulvaney out of his office. Students and staff lined up in the hallways, mouths open, as the detectives walked John down the hall in handcuffs. Helene and I followed them outside, the crowd from the clinic trailing behind us.

I thought I’d seen some terrible things. Heard some terrible stories. But as we all stood there, blinking in the cold daylight, and watched John Mulvaney duck, still bawling like a child, into the backseat of a squad car, I knew I’d hit a new bottom. It was truly the saddest sight I’ve ever seen.

A
search of John Mulvaney’s property turned up a pair of leather gloves (wool-lined), a pair of coveralls, a denim jacket with a fleece lining, and a pair of Wolverines, size 10—all stained with Drew Sturdivant’s blood and hidden in a garbage bag in John’s garage. Traces of Drew’s blood were found on the gas and brake pedals of John’s Honda. (They always forget about the pedals, Jackson had said.) The carpet in his trunk smelled as though it had recently been cleaned. And the fingerprint, of course, turned out to be his.

I still didn’t understand why John had so deliberately drawn me into the carnage. Until McKnight sent a squad car for me late Sunday afternoon. “I think you should see this,” he said.

I walked into John Mulvaney’s living room and looked around. The floors and walls were bare, the furniture stiff and unwelcoming. There were no lamps, only an old overhead fixture, which had become a burial ground for moths and gnats. The only touch of personality came from several picture frames, arranged at angles around the room. I walked over to the mantle, picked one up, and gasped, then looked more closely at the rest. All the photos were of me.

As we walked through the house, the rooms became more bizarre and disordered. Books, newspapers, and magazines teetered in stacks. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink. Dark lumps of clothing lay in heaps on the floor. A plant lay overturned and dying. And everywhere, there were photos of me.
Snapshots were taped to the cabinets in his kitchen and poster-size shots were pinned to the walls of his bedroom. Framed photos punctuated the shelves of his study. All the photos had been taken without my knowledge, of course. At different times of day. In every possible state of dress. Some, it seemed, had been taken from quite a distance. In many of them, I recognized the rooms of my house in the background.

One photo taped to the wall in his study—a close-up of me smiling and talking to David at an outdoor cafe at night—was pocked with holes. He’d been using it as a dartboard.

His study housed a Macintosh computer stocked with photo-imaging software, along with what looked to be a very expensive color laser printer. His desk was littered with digital photography equipment. McKnight scrolled through the images in his cameras. More images of me.

“Stop,” I said finally. “I don’t want to see any more.”

McKnight put the camera down.

“I guess he had a thing for you,” Jackson said.

“How flattering,” I said.

“These pictures,” McKnight said, “they could be of anyone. You know that, don’t you? You’re just…the object of his obsession. Object being the key word here.”

“I know. It’s not about me. He doesn’t know me.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Jackson said. “He couldn’t possibly.”

I turned to McKnight. “Still believe in the Occam rule?”

“How does it go again?”

“In complex situations, barring the supernatural, the simplest solution is usually the right one.”

He shrugged. “Sure. But sometimes the simplest explanation isn’t the obvious one. I’ll give you that.”

I stepped past the dartboard and back into the living room, McKnight following along silently behind me. “You can’t bar the supernatural,” I said at last.

“Come again?”

“‘Barring the supernatural, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.’ That’s the rule. But you can’t bar the supernatural.”

“Take a look around, Dr. Foster. This ain’t the supernatural. This is just plain sick.”

“What do you make of the evil you saw in that interview room? You saw it, Detective. You felt it. It was as real as the two of us standing here now.”

He nodded. “Yep. I did.”

“There’s more to this than simple deviance and violence. We ran across…something dark, something very dark in that interview room.”

He nodded.

“That’s all I’m saying,” I said. “Sometimes there’s more to a situation than you can see with your eyes.”

I said my good-byes and walked out of John Mulvaney’s twisted little world and out into the crisp afternoon. The sun had begun its slide behind the leaves, pinking the sky and lighting the houses around me in a bright, golden wash of light. The bare branches of the trees seemed sharp, lined out against the wash of color in hard relief. The scene was so artful, so vivid, it seemed almost ordained, like a photograph.

But I’d had enough of photographs for one day. I got in my truck and drove to my house, my back to the sunset, switching my headlights on in the dimming winter light, my eyes fixed firmly on the road ahead.

I never got the chance to ask Gordon Pryne why he confessed to a crime he didn’t commit. Martinez saw him a couple of times before they shipped him back to Huntsville. Jackson and McKnight blamed it on the meth. And barring the supernatural, I suppose that made sense. But from what I knew about Peter Terry, and about the battle Gordon Pryne was clearly losing for his
mind and for his soul, I suspected he’d been put up to it.

Peter Terry is a liar, a cheat, and a thief. He’d steal what was left of Gordon Pryne just for the sheer entertainment of it. He enjoys waste, I believe. He preys on the lost and broken while they’re standing at the brink, and then lures them over the edge to an ugly demise. To waste a soul, to trick a human being—the invaluable bearer of divine image—into despair and self-abnegation, this, for him, would be the consummate victory in his strange, twisted game. A losing game for his side, ultimately. I was certain he knew that. But clearly he intended to rack up as many points as possible before the buzzer.

I hoped that sometime, during her years at the Jesus commune, Drew Sturdivant had heard about love instead of judgment. I wanted to believe that someone had mentioned to her, even once, that God, unlike any other father she’d known in her short, impoverished life, is magnanimous with His love. That He dips from a bottomless well of regard and would fill even her dirty, chipped cup generously and without blame.

I hoped she’d heard somewhere along the way that love is not something that must be earned. That grace is not a merit-based system. And that there are no grades to be won or lost.

I doubted she had. Her report cards were proof enough of that. The paucity of this truth in Drew’s life was, to me, the final tragedy of her brief time on this hard, surly earth.

I met Maria Chavez that night for supper, and invited Detective Martinez along at the last minute. The three of us went to a little Italian place with outside heaters and a roaring brick pizza oven and sat outside, tossing our winter coats aside in the warmth of the enclosed patio.