I shrugged. ‘It got you off my back. And it’s a good thing. What would have happened at the dance last night if you’d called the police and I wasn’t there to help?’
‘Technically nothing, from what I hear,’ he said. ‘The bomb was fake. That doesn’t make you any less brave, of course, but it made your attempt to defuse it a lot less vital.’
I smiled thinly. ‘Fair enough. You gonna turn me in now? The Homecoming Hero?’
‘I don’t . . .’ He didn’t finish the sentence. ‘Is your father here?’
‘Nope.’
‘When will he be back?’
‘I’ve been wondering the same thing for nine years.’
The pastor nodded, as if that explained something important. ‘And your mother?’
‘Grocery shopping.’
He nodded again. ‘You know, I’m not sure I understand you, John. I talk to a lot of troubled cases at the church, and all of them lie now and then, and all of them break promises, but you . . . you’re the only one I’ve met who’ll lie to my face and scare me to death and then turn around and risk his own life to help somebody.’
‘I’m full of surprises.’
‘That you are,’ he said. ‘Your theory about the Handyman, at the very least, seems to have been proven entirely accurate.’ He shifted on his feet, looking over my shoulder at the room beyond.
‘Why are you here?’ I asked.
‘Same thing as before,’ he told me. ‘I want you to talk to my friend.’
‘Because you think I’m going to hurt someone.’
‘I think you would benefit from a talk with a therapist.’
I laughed, thin and hollow. ‘How many lives do I have to save before you stop thinking I’m a bad guy?’
‘We had a deal, John—’
‘The deal is off,’ I said firmly. It’s time to end this, I thought. Act forceful – don’t leave any room for argument. ‘You go to the police, and you tell them I talked about killing someone two weeks ago. They’ll ask why you didn’t report this earlier, and you’ll sound like an idiot when all you can say is, “He asked me not to”. They’ll ask if you have any evidence beyond your own word, and you won’t. They’ll ask if you’re aware that John Cleaver risked his life to save a building full of people, and you’ll be officially out of options.’ I folded my arms. ‘The police like me a lot. But you go ahead and try, if it makes you feel better.’
I watched him carefully, keeping my own face impassive. Did it work? Did he buy it? If he calls my bluff and goes to the police, I could actually get in a lot of trouble. I had to hope my confidence convinced him.
He stood on the landing, not speaking. After a moment, he sighed and said, ‘I see.’ He looked me in the eye, the corners of his mouth turned down, his own eyes dull. Sadness. ‘Just . . . be careful, John. You’re getting into something very dangerous, probably more dangerous than I’m even aware of. If you need anything, please call me.’
I said nothing.
He turned and left.
Chapter 17
Sheriff Meier’s body arrived at the mortuary a few days later, on Monday afternoon, and I got home from school just as Mom and Margaret were getting started. I washed up and joined them, cleaning the body and setting the features, smearing the wounds with Vaseline. While we worked I thought about Nobody, trying to piece together what little clues I had about her. She kills young girls. She makes it look like suicide.
That was it. That was all I knew. There had been no fingerprints at the scene but the girls’ own; no sign of a struggle; no evidence that any of the deaths had been anything but suicide. I supposed it was possible the police knew something they weren’t making public, but any secret evidence they had probably still pointed to suicide, or Officer Jensen would be a lot more protective of his daughter.
As I worked on the body I tried several times to roll it over and work on the back, but every time Mom found something else to do first: there was still dirt in his hair, and we had to wash it again; the string in his jaw was too tight, and it was making the nose looked pinched and unnatural. None of it was true – he looked fine. She was stalling.
‘We’re going to have to roll him over eventually,’ I said. ‘We can’t embalm him until we seal up the back.’
‘I know,’ she said, grimacing. ‘I just don’t know if I can handle it. I’m pretty desensitised to this stuff, but still – David Coleman had how many wounds in his back? And how many more is this one going to have?’
I shrugged. ‘There’s no getting around it.’
She sighed and said, ‘Let’s do it, then.’ We stood on the body’s left and lifted it up, flopping it gently down onto its face. We stopped in surprise, mouths open, then bent over the back to look more closely: it was still heavily mangled, but not nearly as bad as Coleman’s had been. I started counting, and Mom grabbed the file from the side counter.
‘Twenty-two, twenty-three . . .’
‘Thirty-four,’ she said, looking up from the folder. ‘That’s even less than Mayor Robinson.’
‘And Pastor Olsen had thirty-two,’ I said. ‘They were all pretty much the same, except Coleman. Why was he different?’
‘That’s not our concern,’ said Mom quickly, snapping the folder closed and setting it aside. ‘We’re here to make sure Sheriff Meier looks as good for his viewing as he did in life - that’s it. We are not investigating this.’
‘But it’s important.’
‘Not for us,’ she said again, picking up a jar of Vaseline. ‘Let’s just be grateful it’s not as bad as we thought, and we won’t speak of it any more.’
I started to protest again, but she glared at me and I stopped. Margaret glanced at us from her side table, said nothing, then turned back to her work on the organs. I closed my mouth and went to work on the lacerated back.
Three victims, all nearly identical, with a victim in the middle that breaks the pattern. It wasn’t just the eyes, it was the back wounds as well. They weren’t part of a rising trend, they were an anomalous spike. How does it fit?
What does it mean?
I reviewed the facts as I packed the stab wounds with cotton, struggling to make sense of the chaos. The Handyman kills, he gets angry, he takes it out on his victims’ backs. Something about Coleman made him far more angry than any of the others. So what made him angry?
The obvious first guess was Coleman’s sin. He was the only one killed for looking at porn, underage porn specifically, and that might have a special significance for the killer. Was he traumatised in his youth? Was he abused or molested? But this was an ageless demon we were talking about, not a human. Did they have a youth to be traumatised in? Could they even be traumatised at all?
But the more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed. The Handyman had already reacted to the porn by taking Coleman’s eyes, and he had done it as coldly and clinically as he had the hands and tongue. The rage in evidence on Coleman’s back was separate, and was sparked by something else. As odd as it seemed, I had to consider the possibility that the two anomalies in Coleman’s corpse were unrelated. Something made the Handyman so mad that he lost control more than he ever had before. An external force? Something in his personal life? I felt completely bewildered. I didn’t even know if he had a personal life.
We finished packing the stab wounds and smeared them with Vaseline, covering them tightly with bandaging tape and rolling the body back over. Mom began to prepare the embalming fluid, and I used a scalpel and hook to open the corpse’s collar and pull out a vein. We slit it open, inserted the tubes, and turned on the pump.
Marci and I had already talked about the back wounds weeks ago, sitting in the office during the Mayor’s funeral; we’d hypothesised that the cause of the anger was the killing itself. Something about the act of killing enrages him. But then why kill at all?
We know why he kills, I thought. He wants to punish the guilty. But what prompts that desire? What mechanism clicks inside of his head and says, ‘Now is the tim
e to kill’? Each victim had been fifteen days apart, except for the last one: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Tuesday. Did the days mean anything, or just the time between them? Was the most recent killing a day early, or was the daily pattern simply a coincidence?
I looked at the calendar on the wall, a large poster of a beach resort with all twelve months printed in tiny blocks at the bottom. Mom watched me, probably guessing that I was thinking about the killings, but I ignored her and stepped up to the wall, pulling off my rubber gloves and tapping each death date with my finger: 8 August, 23 August, 7 September, 21 September. That didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, so I began looking for other dates, grabbing a pen off the counter and marking everything I could think of. Here’s the attack at the dance. Here’s when Coleman was fired. This is when they found the pastor’s hands, and this is when they found the Mayor’s . . .
Saturday, 4 September. He burned the Mayor’s hands, and was almost caught doing it, just three days before he turned Coleman’s back into hamburger. It was the closest relationship between any of the dates I’d marked.
I stared at the calendar, my mind racing, kicking myself for not seeing it before. He was almost caught – is that what made him mad? But no – the Handyman had written letters to the paper, and then forced Ashley to read another letter at the dance. It wasn’t the revelation of evidence that made him angry, so it had to be something else. Some other aspect of the burning. What did he do that he didn’t have to do? He didn’t have to run. He could have stayed by the fire and waved as the hikers went past, and no one would have suspected a thing. They only saw the lumps because they got up close and poked through the fire, and they only got close because his running made them suspicious. He didn’t have to run, but he did. Why?
It all came back to guilt: he ran because he didn’t want anyone to see what he’d done. He felt guilty; he felt ashamed. He killed because his victims were sinners, but killing was also a sin, and he knew it. That’s what made him angry enough to stab the bodies more than thirty times, and that’s what made him go out and burn the hands in a ritual cleansing . . .
A ritual.
What if he wasn’t finished?
The Handyman’s attacks showed strong signs of ritual behaviour – the way he planned them so carefully, the way he killed so precisely, and the way he posed and displayed the bodies. What if this ritual extended long after the kill, to a ceremonial destruction of the victim’s last remaining pieces? He’d done it with the pastor and with Coleman, and he’d tried to do it with Mayor Robinson, but the hikers had stumbled in and scared him away before he could finish. He used that ritual to absolve his guilt and diffuse his rage, and without that emotional release all his rage would have continued building and building until it exploded on Mr Coleman in an animalistic fury. Sixty-four stab wounds. It made sense.
It almost made sense. From what Officer Jensen had said, the Mayor’s hands and tongue had still been destroyed by the fire; there was no real flesh left, just charred bones and lumps of what used to be meat. What else was there to do? A prayer he hadn’t said? A curse he hadn’t spoken? What was different about that day’s ritual?
The gloves.
Stephanie had talked about gloves – remnants of burned gloves that had been in the fire with Coleman’s hands, and now in the fire with the pastor’s hands. There had been no gloves in the fire with Mayor Robinson’s. That was the missing piece – that was the difference that had made his next attack so violent: he hadn’t been able to burn his gloves.
But what did the gloves mean? He wore gloves when he killed, so they were evidence, but a ritual like this implied far more than simply burning evidence. He destroyed his victims’ hands because they represented the sins that made his victims guilty; if he was equating hands with sin, it was no great stretch to think that the gloves represented his own hands, and his own sins. Over and over, kill after kill. What had he said at the end of his letter? The city will be purified by fire. He was using the fire to burn away his sins, and that one time he hadn’t been able to do it. For all his bluster, for all his talk of righteous judgment, he knew deep down that he was just as guilty as we were. Maybe more so.
And that is the gap in his armour.
I stepped back from the calendar, looking quickly around the room. Margaret was still in the corner, cleaning the removed organs, and Mom was fidgeting with the pump. She looked up, met my eyes, then turned back to the pump with her lips pressed together. The sound of the embalming pump filled the room, a rhythmic heartbeat, and I breathed deeply. I have him, I thought. I’ve cracked his code, and I know how he thinks.
I still didn’t know what this demon’s powers were, though his reliance on mundane weapons made me suspect that he didn’t have claws or super-strength or anything like that. Nobody still might – I knew virtually nothing about her – so I needed to be careful of her. They were probably working together: he’d make a spectacle of himself to draw my attention, and as soon as I thought I had him, Nobody would jump out and attack me from behind.
I needed to find a way to separate them. I need to lay a trap, I thought. I know the Handyman now; I can lure him somewhere and trap him like a rat. Once he was contained, I’d only have to deal with one demon at a time.
Phase One: I need to make him really, really mad.
Chapter 18
Dear Editor
The Handyman killer has announced to our community that he has come to purify our town; to save Clayton from the evil men who would lead her into temptation and sin.
Forgive me if I call his bluff: nothing could be further from the truth! Are we to believe that this cold-blooded killer is a paragon of virtue? Are we to accept this unrepentant sinner as our spiritual guide? The Scriptures tell us, ‘By their fruits ye shall know them,’ and the Handyman’s fruits are unmistakably evil. He is a monster, a sinner more vile than the righteous men he claims to have punished, and we would do well to ignore him.
To the Handyman himself, I have this to say: ‘Come back to the fold. The sins you have committed can be washed away; the heavy burdens that weigh you down can be lifted. Your hands can be made clean. It will be long, and it will be difficult, but under the guidance of the Lord’s servants you can be purified again.
‘Look not to false prophets. Trust in the Church, and in its leaders. We will not lead you astray.’
Sincerely,
Father Brian Erikson
‘You ready?’
Marci opened the door. ‘You better believe it. What do you think of the shirt?’ She was wearing a black shirt with short, kind of puffy sleeves.
‘Yeah, it looks great. You’ve shown me that one before.’
‘I’ve got so many,’ she laughed, ‘it’s hard to keep track.’
‘I’m glad you’re feeling better.’
‘I feel great,’ she said. ‘I feel perfect.’ She smiled. ‘Where we going?’
‘We don’t have to go anywhere,’ I said, shrugging. It was getting too cold to go biking, or hiking, or any of the other things Marci typically liked to do. We’d spent the last couple of days hanging out at her house, watching TV or playing cards, and that was fine with me. The paper hadn’t run my letter yet, and I was too on edge to do much of anything else.
‘I can’t stand it in here any more,’ she said. ‘I need to get out – I need to see the world again.’
‘Sounds good to me. Any part of the world in particular?’
‘Food first,’ she said, following me out to the car. ‘Something greasy and disgusting. The food in this house is almost too healthy to eat.’ I chuckled, and we got in my car. ‘Friendly Burger,’ she said, buckling her belt. ‘I haven’t been there in a while.’
I nodded, and pulled out from the kerb. Friendly Burger was one of those places you only ever see in small towns: a burger joint owned, operated and patronised purely by the locals. The sign was a giant wooden cut-out of a smiling cheeseburger with two little arms, giving a thumbs-up; you could see it for b
locks.
‘You know what I love about this place?’ asked Marci, as the sign came into view. ‘It doesn’t have any franchises.’
‘And that makes you love it?’
‘It means it’s the only one,’ she said. ‘You go anywhere in the world and you’ll find a McDonald’s. But there’s only one Friendly Burger, and it’s only here. It’s completely unique.’
‘So it’s only awesome because nobody else wants one?’
‘Oh, I think everybody wants one; everyone who’s been there, at least. What makes it awesome is that they refuse to sell out.’
We pulled into the lot and parked under the sign.
‘You know what I always wonder about this place?’ I said, pointing up. ‘It’s that sign. Would a hamburger really give a thumbs-up if he knew you were going to eat him?’