I wasn’t going to burn anything.
My tension was still there - my rage, my fear, my desperation - but I couldn’t let it out. Not like this. This was too loose and uncontrolled. I think somewhere, deep down, I’d wanted to provoke the cat to attack so I’d have an excuse to hurt it. But I would not allow myself to hurt it.
Trying to release my tension in safe little doses like this was becoming too dangerous; there had to be a better way. But bottling it up, never to be released at all, wasn’t working either, and I definitely couldn’t just pull out the stops and let it run wild. There had to be a middle ground.
What I needed was another demon.
I’d never been as comfortable as I had been over the winter, hunting the demon that stalked my town. I’d had focus and direction; I’d had a purpose that gave everything meaning. I’d been able to let Mr Monster out, and because of that, I’d been able to live at peace with myself for the first time in years. Now that the demon was gone, my psychological outlet was gone, too.
I walked out of the warehouse slowly, breathing in a controlled, steady rhythm. We had another victim, but no killer to hunt; it was not a demon, it was not a serial killer, it was just a drunk husband or a jealous boyfriend . . .
A jealous boyfriend. Forman had said that the body was covered in small wounds - stabs and scrapes and burns and blisters and who knew what else. An angry, jealous boyfriend could have done that easily; an angry, jealous boyfriend who had no respect for women and, as such, treated them like dirt. A man like that would have no qualms about inflicting that kind of pain on a woman.
And I knew exactly where to find a man like that.
It was a long shot, I knew, but it was something. It was a clear, attainable goal: to follow a man who might be the killer to determine if he really was. I could live the way I had before; I could serve Mr Monster’s needs without endangering my own.
It was time to get to know Curt much, much better.
Chapter 6
The victim was eventually identified as Victoria Chatham. Since she hadn’t come to us for embalming, there was no chance to examine the body or study the wounds. That left me no direct way of learning more about the man who had inflicted those wounds, so my study of the killer would have to begin elsewhere.
And since I was stuck in school for a few more weeks, ‘elsewhere’ meant a lop-sided conversation with Max in the lunch room.
‘The central question of criminal profiling,’ I said, ‘is “What does the killer do that he doesn’t have to do.”’
‘Oh please, not again,’ said Max, rolling his eyes.
‘This really works,’ I insisted. ‘And it works better to have someone else to bounce ideas off of. You were really helpful last time.’
‘If I was so helpful, why didn’t you catch the bad guy?’
Actually I did.
‘The FBI agent at the police station called me in and showed me the crime-scene photos before they went public,’ I said. ‘He asked for my help.’
‘Shut up.’
‘No, seriously.’
‘John, we are two tables away from three incredibly hot girls in incredibly short shorts, and I so don’t have time for another analytical conversation with you.’
I closed my eyes. Brooke was sitting just two tables down with two of her friends, Marci and Rachel, but I’d already used up my one allowed lunchtime conversation and my two allowed lunchtime looks. Brooke had her hair up in a pony tail, tied with some kind of pink ribbon or elastic. She was wearing a pink T-shirt with white stripes, and a pair of jean shorts that showed off her long, slender legs. I wasn’t even allowed to think about her any more, which was the whole point of analysing the killer instead.
My fingers itched to burn something.
‘The body was covered with wounds,’ I said. ‘They said it on the news and I saw it in the photo. The killer hurt her before he killed her; he tortured her. Why would he do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Max. ‘You’re the scary weirdo - why would you do that?’
‘That’s insulting, but yes, putting ourselves into his place is more or less what we’re doing here.’
‘I’m serious,’ said Max. ‘If you were going to kill someone that way, which I’m not entirely ruling out, why would you do it?’
This is better than nothing. ‘Because I want something,’ I said, ‘and killing her, in that manner, would help me get it.’
‘So what do you want?’
‘I don’t know what I want,’ I said. ‘That’s the whole thing we’re trying to figure out. We have to work backwards.’
‘Okay,’ said Max, looking at the ceiling and waving his hands slowly. ‘What do you get when you kill someone in a way that gets you whatever it is that you want?’
‘What do I gain by killing someone in this way?’ I said.
‘That’s what I said.’
‘I gain . . . satisfaction.’
‘That’s really sick,’ said Max.
‘It’s not me, remember. The killer gains satisfaction.’
‘It’s still sick,’ Max grunted. ‘What else?’
‘The killer gains revenge. The killer gains power.’
‘The killer gains peace and quiet,’ said Max.
‘Probably not,’ I said. ‘If all you want to do is shut someone up, there are easier ways to do it than torturing them to death.’
‘What if it’s someone who’s been nagging you your whole life, and you just can’t stand it any more, and you want to make them suffer for it before they die? Then your reward is peace and quiet.’
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘in that case your reward would be power, revenge and satisfaction. You’d be taking control of your life, and getting revenge on the person who’d taken it away from you.’
‘And when you’re done with all that,’ said Max, ‘you’d have peace and quiet. I’m telling you, it keeps coming back to that.’
‘Does it though?’ I asked. ‘If I want peace and quiet, the last thing I’m going to do is dump a dead body in the middle of an ongoing serial-killer investigation. This death is going to get more coverage, more attention, and a lot more investigation than any other dead body in any other nowhere town.’
‘All right already,’ said Max. ‘I give up - I don’t get peace and quiet. I get the exact opposite of peace and quiet; I get . . . war and noise. I get a noisy war; I’m a terrorist.’
Pieces clicked together in my mind. ‘Maybe you are,’ I said, leaning forward eagerly. ‘I mean, not a standard terrorist, but it’s the same general idea. You use violence to get attention.’
‘So I’m a four year old?’
‘You’re doing this on purpose,’ I said, ‘because you want people to notice you. You kill someone in a weird way, leave them in an obvious place, and that’s how you get your message out.’
‘Why is this suddenly me instead of you?’
‘Me then. Whatever. The killer. The killer is trying to say something, “I hate women”, or “I’m better than you”, or something like that.’
‘“I can do whatever I want”.’
‘Exactly.’
Max took a bite of his sandwich. ‘So who’s he talking to?’
‘I don’t know. Everyone, I guess. The police. The FBI. We have an agent in from out of town who does this for a living, so he might be talking to him.’
‘What if it’s the Clayton Killer?’
‘The methods are completely different,’ I said.
‘No, I mean what if he’s talking to the Clayton Killer?’
I stared back. The Clayton Killer was dead, but Max didn’t know that. Nobody did. Including the new killer.
What if this was one killer’s way of saying, ‘Hi, I’m new in town?’ to another?
‘Holy crap, here she comes,’ said Max.
‘Who?’ I looked up sharply and saw Brooke coming straight towards us. That was three looks during lunch; I wasn’t allowed that many. I had to follow my rules as strictly as I could, even if she initiat
ed it. They were my first and last defence against Mr Monster, and if I could do anything I wanted, then so could he. I couldn’t let that happen.
‘If she asks what we’re talking about,’ said Max, ‘please say cars.’
Brooke stepped up to the table. ‘Hey John.’
‘Hey.’ I wasn’t allowed to talk to her again during lunch either, after saying ‘hi’ on the way into the lunch room.
‘You have English next?’ she asked.
‘Yeah.’ I tried to be as polite as I could, watching the wall behind her, looking just to the right of her face.
‘Mrs Barlow said we’re starting the same new unit as your class,’ Brooke said. ‘Beowulf and Grendel.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, hoping for the conversation to end. Then, desperate not to seem rude, I added, ‘They sound really interesting.’ I gritted my teeth. I shouldn’t have said that.
‘They do,’ said Brooke. I could see in my peripheral vision that she was smiling. I glanced down at the table, then back up at the space just beyond her other shoulder.
‘I think it would be great to talk about it,’ she said, ‘you know, like in the car and stuff. Since we’re there every day anyway.’
‘Sure,’ I said. I wasn’t supposed to contribute to the conversation, but what else could I do? ‘That would help a lot in class, since we’re in different ones.’
‘Exactly,’ said Brooke. ‘We can share all the brilliant insights from each other’s classes, and then sound like geniuses in our own.’
I looked down at the table again. ‘Yeah.’ Please leave.
‘Great!’ she said. ‘I guess I’ll see you in the car?’
‘Yeah.’
‘All right, see you there!’ She walked away. Finally.
Max stared at her back. ‘Goodbye, beautiful butt. I’ll miss you.’ He turned back to me and clapped his hands silently. ‘Effing brilliant, by the way. I’d never picked you for that kind of romantic subtlety.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I said, running a hand over my head. It felt prickly and wrong, like it was caught in a spiderweb.
‘Brushing her off like that,’ said Max. ‘If the second-hottest girl in school walked up to me, wearing those shorts and begging to be my study partner, there’s not a chance in hell I could have played it so cool. I don’t think anyone in school could have played it that cool.’
‘The second hottest girl?’
‘She’s no Marci,’ said Max. ‘But seriously, I’m very impressed. You’ve got her wrapped around your finger.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.
‘Don’t be modest, dude, it’s a great plan.’ Max leaned back and gestured broadly with both hands. ‘You give her just enough attention to show what a nice guy you are, and then you back off and let her fill in the blanks herself. It’s really starting to work; the “hard to get” strategy is paying off.’
‘That’s not what that was.’
‘Oh come on,’ he scoffed. ‘You think nobody notices? You drive her to school every morning, you gaze longingly as she walks away, and then you practically avoid her the rest of the day. Yesterday at lunch you walked up to her, chatted about her shoes, of all things, and then just one period later you walked right past her in the hall and pretended not to notice when she smiled at you.’
That was the break between fifth and sixth period; English and math. She had a class right on my path from one to the other, so I usually walked around the other hallway to avoid her. That day I’d been held up talking to the teacher and didn’t have time, so I walked straight down the hall staring at the floor, just so I wouldn’t see her.
And apparently she liked this? How could I ever hope to understand people!
It had to stop. I couldn’t let her get any closer to me than she was now; not like this. Mr Monster wanted her so much it hurt.
‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ I said. ‘She’s just the girl I drive to school, nothing more.’
‘Are you kidding me?’ asked Max. ‘I think even people in other countries can tell you’re in love with her.’
‘I spend too much time with her already,’
‘What does that mean?’ Max asked. ‘She’s a fox, man. When I say that she’s the second hottest girl in school, I assure you that I have devoted a lot of time to a detailed comparison. You need to get over yourself and ask her out.’
I stared at him: ‘Are you crazy?’
‘No,’ said Max, ‘you’re crazy. I actually think you’re playing hard to get a little too well; she probably would have asked you out herself by now if you made yourself a bit more available.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because I pay attention,’ said Max. ‘She is, as mentioned, very hot. And when you’re busily ignoring her she sends a lot of interested glances in your direction. I think she finds you mysterious, though I’m starting to think you’re just a clueless idiot.’
I didn’t need this. I had enough trouble keeping Mr Monster under control - living through his fantasies at night and then spending my days building a cage of rules and behaviour patterns to keep those fantasies from becoming reality. He wanted to hurt people, sometimes very badly, and the things he’d planned for Brooke were almost too horrific to think about. He wanted to possess her, wholly and completely, and he couldn’t do that until she was dead. It was all I could do to look at her and smile, with this black pit of intent roiling inside me. And now here was my friend, my only friend, telling me I should focus on her even more - spend more time with her, think about her more often, and do more things to attract her to me.
Something had to change, and soon, or nobody around me would be safe.
Chapter 7
For my sixteenth birthday I got a dead body to play with: Mrs Soder, the oldest woman in Clayton County, finally died. The corpse was laid out on the stainless-steel embalming table, the body bag removed and the body motionless. It had died in the hospital, and they’d shipped it to us in a hospital gown. This made it a lot easier; rather than wrestle with real clothes, or try to get the family’s permission to cut them off, we could just snip a tie here and there and have the hospital gown off in seconds. The embalming would be almost too easy. I wanted to take as much time as possible, so I could really enjoy it.
Mom was in the office, signing some papers with Ron, the Coroner, and Margaret wasn’t here yet. Lauren was technically our office assistant, but she still wasn’t speaking to Mom and, naturally, wasn’t here either.
All the more time for me.
I touched its hair, long and white and very fine, like cornsilk. Mrs Soder had been nearly a hundred years old when she died, and the body curved oddly on the table thanks to the old-age hump in its spine. The first thing you do with a body, naturally, is to make sure it’s dead: it’s definitely going to be dead by the time you’re done with it, so you’d better make sure it’s not alive when you start.
We had a small make-up mirror in one of the drawers, and I held it in front of the body’s nose. A living body, even in a coma, would start to mist it up with its breath. I counted to twenty as I held the mirror, but nothing happened. It wasn’t breathing. I then put the mirror back and pulled out a sewing needle, small and sharp but large enough to keep a solid grip on. I poked the body in the fingertip - not deep enough to break the skin, but hard enough to shock the nerves and spark an involuntary reaction. Nothing moved. It was dead.
I pulled over a portable sink, basically just an elevated bucket on wheels, and placed it under the head. Step two in an embalming was to wash the body, and the hair was one of the most important parts because it was one of the most visible. It didn’t look like anyone had washed or brushed this body’s hair in a while, but that was fine with me. It gave me more time. We had a small rubber hose hooked up to our stationary sink, and I pulled it over and sprayed it just enough to wet the hair. We didn’t have a special shampoo for corpses, just a bottle of the same stuff we used upstairs, and I squeezed a bit onto the upper side
of the head, near the forehead. Then I started to brush it through.
‘Hey John,’ said Mom, bustling into the room in green medical scrubs. She had on her flustered face - eyes slightly wide, mouth slightly open, teeth clamped together - but she was moving loosely, almost casually. Sometimes I think she enjoyed being flustered, and acted like it even when she was relaxed. ‘Sorry to leave you alone so long; Ron had some kind of new state form I’d never seen before.’
‘That’s okay,’ I said.
Mom paused, turned, and looked at me. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’m just washing its hair.’