The Darker Side

  Fine. Why, then, does he need to tell the world about it?

  Because he thinks the world is not listening.

  The world? No. That’s the visible manifestation. We’re dealing with a serial killer here. This isn’t a man who had a strong belief and devoted himself to getting the word out. This is a man who’s spent twenty years or more looking for those with the worst secrets so he could murder them on camera. However you slice it, whatever the supposed belief system constructed around it, murder is still always an act of anger. It may or may not be anger at the person being murdered. In fact, in the case of serial killers, it’s most often misplaced rage. Mom or Dad, killed over and over and over again.

  Someone or something was not listening at some point in his life. Someone or something intimate to him, someone or something important and entwined with his sense of self. The consequences of this angered him, and now he’s making sure that this particular message never gets swept under the carpet again.

  What’s the message?

  Simple words. He’s said them in various ways; I hear them now like a bell: Don’t lie to God.

  There’s a flaw in his logic, I realize, a huge, gaping hole in his argument: the people he’s murdered had already confessed their sins. They’d done what he said they should, they’d knelt down in the confessional and they’d struggled with the words until they found the courage to say them.

  Maybe he doesn’t consider that his victims were flawed. Perhaps they weren’t examples of what not to do, but examples of what should be done. Maybe the fact that they’d already confessed and were thus guaranteed a place in heaven let him kill without guilt, provided him with the system of rationalization he needed to violate that commandment we all seem to agree on: thou shalt not kill.

  Or maybe, I think, this is where the rubber leaves the road with him. Maybe this is where he stops making sense and starts making crazy. He’s built himself a church of ideas, but it was built on murder, with the bones of his victims.

  Maybe, I think, for all his speeches about truth, he’s the one lying the most.

  I smile at this idea. I like the idea of him failing himself and his principles. I like it a lot.

  You’re no different. I look at all these names, and that’s what I really see. Just like all the monsters; you’re not talking to God, you’re not talking to me, in the end, you’re talking to someone you used to know, and however much you scream, they’ll probably never listen.

  IT’S TEN O’CLOCK. EVERYONE IS back at Death Central, listening as James briefs us on the results of the phone calls.

  “We were able to confirm specific churches for approximately ninety percent of victims killed within the last five years. Beyond five years the percentages go down because the priest running the church has changed.”

  I hadn’t thought of this, but it makes sense. The Catholic Church has personnel turnover like anyone else.

  “It’s worth noting that of those we were able to confirm, the priest involved generally remembered them without much prompting. They were almost invariably hard-luck cases who made good. Some exceptions, of course, but true in most instances.”

  “It’d fit with his manifesto,” I say. “Those who came clean reversed the course of their lives.”

  “He chose the churches well. The ones he went after, with few exceptions, were similar to the Redeemer here. Churches run by priests who tried to help those having the most troubles.”

  “The most likely to have bad shit in their past,” Alan points out. “Also least likely to be missed.”

  “Now for the bad news. None of the priests we talked to—not one—remembers anyone strange hanging around at the times our victims disappeared.”

  “Nothing at all?” I ask.

  “No. We were very specific with our questions. ‘Do you remember a man who would have left around the same time that particular victim disappeared?’ for example. Not one answer in the affirmative.”

  I’m dumbfounded. It wouldn’t have surprised me to find most saw nothing. He’d have been careful, people aren’t that observant—but no one remembers anything at all? That’s very strange.

  “What about cleaning people?”

  “We asked, of course. Most of these churches are too poor to pay for someone to come in and clean. They do the work themselves.”

  I shake my head. “Let’s break it down. He’d need access and he’d have to fit in. Especially in these environments. These churches would be small, the parishioners tight-knit. It’d be difficult for a stranger to come in and not stick out.”

  “He could have pretended to be a parishioner,” Callie says. “A down-and-outer like the others.”

  “Then why wouldn’t these priests remember that? He wouldn’t have stuck around, he’d have left once he had his victims. Plus, based on Father Yates, I think we’re dealing with priests used to keeping their eyes open. They know they’re not preaching to a congregation of innocent little lambs.”

  “Frustrating,” Jezabel observes.

  James’s cell phone rings.

  “Yes? What? Okay. Thank you.” He snaps his phone shut. “That was computer crimes. We have a new attempt by the Preacher to post a clip on user-tube. They intercepted it and are e-mailing it to me now. They said it’s different.”

  “Different how?” I ask.

  “There’s no victim in this one. But he’s letting us know there will be another one soon.”

  “I SEE THAT THOSE IN law enforcement continue to work diligently to remove my video clips from the website I chose to share them on. That’s understandable and certainly not unexpected. It doesn’t matter all that much now anyway; the clips I posted have already found their way to hard drives around the world. They’re being shared via newsgroups, e-mail, and other viral video websites. It’s the nature of the Internet, and the reason I chose it as my first medium.

  “From this point, I acknowledge, it gets a little more difficult. Law enforcement will likely be preventing my message from getting out at all. Again, not unexpected. For that reason, this particular clip is directed to you, to whoever it may be that is hunting me. I’ve given you everything you need to find me. If you do not, then sometime in the next forty-eight hours, I’ll kill again.” He pauses. His thumb stops moving on the rosary beads. “I’ll say it again: I have given you everything you need to find me. You should know by now: I never lie, and I will keep my promise. Find me.”

  The clip ends.

  “Why does he want to be caught?” Callie asks.

  “It’s the next step,” I say. “You think he’s got an audience now? Wait till he’s in prison. He’ll be a bonafide celebrity. Soapboxing away till they put a needle in his arm.”

  “Which will make him a martyr. Something I doubt he’ll mind,” James points out.

  “Back to the drawing board,” I say, pacing again. “He told us we can find him with the information we have. He says he never lies. I doubt that as a generality, but in this case, I’m buying it because he wants to be captured. We’re missing something. What is it?”

  Alan sighs. “I was never any good at logic problems. Give me a list of suspects to interview and I’m happy to beat my feet all day long. This is your territory, Smoky. You and James.”

  “It will be something simple,” James says, studying the ever-present list of names on the dry-erase board. “We’ll be missing it because it’s obvious. Like the confessional as the source of his knowledge. It was there in front of us, which is why we didn’t see it at first; it was a part of the landscape.”

  “Too apparent,” Jezebel says.

  “Exactly. Hide it in plain sight, just a little disguised. It belongs where it is while we’re looking for something trying to be secret.”

  I remember my original words to AD Jones about the Preacher. I’d said he would have used a disguise on the plane, something simple with perhaps a single striking feature.

  Something shutter clicks inside me.

  I’ve tried to describe this p
henomenon to others, the thing that always seems to herald a sudden realization on my part. It’s like losing time, as though some part of my consciousness grays out, for just a millisecond. I’m left wondering what happened in that millisecond. What did I miss? The answer is simple: the thing I needed to see came into view, but I was not yet ready to understand it. I regain that lost time when I do.

  That’s what just happened, and I’m left to wonder: What is it that I need to understand? What’s that thing that wants to be seen?

  “Talk to me, James,” I murmur. “List out the component parts of the problem one by one.”

  He doesn’t ask me why; we’ve been down this road before.

  “He chooses his victims based on their confessions. He’s able to do this because he’s been bugging confessionals in churches that cater to the more troubled sections of society. The congregations of these churches tend to be tight-knit communities.”

  “Stop there. Why do they tend to be so tight-knit?”

  “Common experiences.”

  “Simpler than that,” I say. “All they have in common is each other. No one else accepts them as they are, faults and all.”

  “Fair enough—which leads us back down the same road: people are watched closely when they come into a group like that, and noticed when they leave. No one remembers a guy leaving around the same time as the victim’s disappearance.”

  Plain sight, plain sight, plain sight…

  The words roll through me like waves that never crest. It’s maddening. I try to be the moon, pulling them toward me with my gravity. They come close, but vanish before they ever hit the shore.

  “Go on,” I say.

  “He needed access, so he had to be there. But no one remembers him being there.”

  I bolt upright.

  The waves hit the shore.

  Plain sight…

  “Because he wasn’t there,” I say, excited. “He understood the mechanics of a group like the ones he needed to infiltrate.”

  The intimacy created when you admit that you’re a fuckup and the people you admit it to accept you anyway, because hey—they’re fuckups too.

  “Someone working with him, you mean,” James says. “How is that any different? They’d still be missed if they left when the victims did.”

  “That’s exactly right. But they didn’t disappear when the victims did. They waited for a while, maybe a few weeks, maybe even a month, and then they slipped away. They’d never need an alibi because they were right there with the rest of the congregation while the victim was being kidnapped and killed.”

  James frowns. “A lot of supposition.”

  “Logical supposition, though, don’t you think?”

  “It makes sense,” he allows. “We need to make the same calls again, but this time we need to broaden our questions. Ask about men that left not long after the victims went missing, but not immediately.”

  “And who had been close to the victims,” I add. “It’d be a part of it for them. Gathering intel, getting familiar with the victim’s life.”

  “You know,” Alan says, “it’d make the most sense for them to be linear in their actions.”

  “I don’t follow,” I say.

  “Their victim pool is going to be filled with people who tend to be transient or unstable. They’d need to plant the bug, find the victim, and make their move. They couldn’t afford to leave and come back, they’d run the risk that their chosen victim had moved on. They’d need to stay focused and remain on-site until the deed was done.”

  “So?”

  “So there should be a lot of time between murders, right? Pick a vic, grab her, film her, kill her, move on to the new locale. That’s a lot of logistics. But we have three dead in less than two weeks. Lisa Reid, Rosemary Sonnenfeld, and Valerie Cavanaugh. Seems to me it’s possible he would have had to pitch in directly on at least one of those in terms of gathering intel, don’t you think?”

  “It’s a good point,” Callie says, “but which one?”

  “Lisa Reid.” James says it as I think it. “Has to be. She’s the one departure, the only victim who wasn’t born a woman. She’s also the one he used to get our attention.”

  I feel the excitement rising in me again. The waves are rolling, moving, cresting, and they all threaten to reach the shore together.

  “We need to focus on those two, right now—Lisa and Rosemary. How did he choose Lisa, anyway? How’d she come on his radar? She wasn’t in his usual stomping grounds, he went after her, she didn’t come to him. So how’d he even know about her? Rosemary is one of our most recent victims and we have an in with Yates. He’ll remember something, someone close to her who—”

  I stop talking as a big wave, a huge wave, comes crashing into shore, roaring for what seems like forever.

  Hiding right in plain sight…

  “He told me early on,” I whisper.

  “What is it?” Callie asks.

  “Yates. We asked to talk to Rosemary’s known associates. She only had one. Andrea.” I swallow. I look at Alan. “Call Yates. Find out Andrea’s last name and check into her background. I have a feeling we’ll find it’s bogus and that she’s long, long gone.”

  36

  “LISA REID WAS A BIT OF AN INTERNAL SCANDAL FOR THE church,” Cardinal Ross tells me. “The priest running that particular church is a younger man, Father Strain. He’s part of a small but growing group of priests who are young, smart, and willing to disagree—albeit respectfully—with Rome on certain issues.”

  “I assume taking confession from a transsexual would fit the bill?”

  “Yes and no.”

  I frown. “Sounds complicated.”

  “The church’s stand on homosexuality remains as it has been. Homosexuality is regarded as a sin. Transgendered individuals are considered to be effeminate, i.e., homosexuals who have used the benefits of modern technology to change their outward appearance to match their inner desires. The fact of that change is not considered by the church to remove the truth that they were born as God created them.”

  “So a transgendered person is basically considered to be a homosexual.”

  “Yes.”

  “You said ‘effeminate.’ What about women changing to men?”

  “Both are held to the same standard. Homosexuality is a sin.”

  “So what does a homosexual who wants to be a Roman Catholic do?”

  “They can receive confession, and are urged to do so, until such time as they change their ways and become as God created them and the Bible demands. If they’re unable to become completely ‘straight’—to marry a member of the opposite sex, for example—then they are expected to practice chastity. Until either of these things happen, they are not to take part in Holy Communion or various other sacraments.”

  “Then…I don’t understand. Where’s the conflict with Strain?”

  “Twofold. Strain was giving Communion to Dexter Reid, for one.”

  “And the other?”

  “Parishioners complained. It can be a different experience depending on where you are, Agent Barrett. A homosexual walking into a church in Los Angeles might expect different treatment than one walking into a church in Texas, for example.”

  “Ah. I understand.”

  “Father Strain was cautioned, nothing more. He was told to stop giving Holy Communion to Dexter Reid and to be more circumspect about his dealings with Dexter. He refused.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Nothing.”

  There’s a quality to that “nothing” that makes me think there are two words missing from it: for now.

  “What will happen to him?”

  “That’s in God’s hands.”

  I chuckle and shake my head. It’s comforting, in a way, to see that a bureaucracy is a bureaucracy the world around. Something tells me that Father Strain can expect no further advancement. Maybe he doesn’t care.

  “Cardinal, I’m looking for a connection. How would Lisa Reid have attr
acted the Preacher’s attention? Was it newsworthy?”

  “It didn’t appear in any major news outlet that I’m aware of. There were some mentions of it on Catholic blogs and in some newsletters. There is debate even within the church, at times, on homosexuality and how best to bring homosexuals into God’s grace. A heated topic, as I’m sure you can imagine.”

  “That could be it,” I murmur. “Maybe he was monitoring religious blogs.”

  “Agent Barrett, do you think Father Strain is in any danger? This man, would he go after the Father for allowing Dexter into the congregation?”

  I notice that we continue the debate he mentioned in the here and now; I say Lisa, he says Dexter. Tomato tomahto, except that we’re talking about a person. It seems like such a casual dismissal on his part of everything Lisa was trying to do and be and feel about herself.

  “I don’t think so. Lisa was a tool for him, a way to draw our attention to what he was doing. He wanted to come out of anonymity with a splash. Lisa fit the bill in spades; her family’s political connections, her controversy. Virginia was way out of his normal stomping grounds. I think he did what he intended to do, and then left. I do need to speak with Father Strain, though.”

  “I understand.”

  Alan pokes his head into my office. “Got something,” he says. He seems excited.

  “Cardinal, I have to go. I appreciate your help.”

  “I’m available when you need me, Agent Barrett.”

  I bet you are, I think as I hang up. Don’t need more scandals now, do you?

  The discourse on homosexuality and his refusal to use the name of Lisa has stirred up some of my old angers with the Catholic Church. There was a time I loved the purity of prayer. Just me and God. It was simple, and there was a kind of peaceful truth to that. I never understood or enjoyed what I perceived as the intolerance, the unwillingness to think beyond, to look beyond. Not much seems to have changed.