The killer is dressed in black. He has a hood over his face.
“Is that a fucking ninja outfit?” Alan rumbles. He shakes his head in disgust. “Christ. It’s all a fucking joke to him.”
My gift as a hunter kicks in on automatic. The killer looks to be about six feet tall. He’s in shape—somewhere in between muscular and wiry. I can tell from the skin exposed around his eyes that he is white.
I’m waiting to hear him speak. Voice-recognition technology has come very far, and this could be a crucial break. But then he disappears from the camera view for a moment. I can hear small sounds of him fumbling with something. When he comes back into the camera’s view he looks right into the lens, and I get the sense from the crinkles around his eyes that he is smiling behind that mask. He lifts up a hand and gives a count with his fingers. 1, 2, 1–2–3–4…
Music fills the room in the video. It drowns out all other noises. It takes me only a moment to place it. When I do, I am almost sick. Almost.
“Jesus Christ,” Charlie whispers, “is that the Rolling Stones?”
“Yep. ‘Gimme Shelter,’” Alan says. His voice is flat with rage. “Just a barrel of laughs for this sick fuck. Giving himself a little mood music.”
The volume is up and the song is loud. As it picks up speed, the killer starts to dance. He has a knife in one hand, and he dances for Annie and for the camera. It’s frenetic, crazy, but he does move with the beat. Insanity with a rhythm.
“Ra-a-ape, murder…”
This is why he picked this song. That’s his message. It echoes my sentiments earlier in the day. What he can do, it’s always just a step away. I close my eyes for a moment as I see that Annie, too, realized this. It is something I can see in her eyes. Terror mixed with a loss of hope.
The killer has stopped dancing, though he still twitches to the beat. His movements seem almost unconscious. Like someone tapping their foot to a song without realizing they’re doing it. He is standing by the bed, his eyes fixed on Annie. He seems mesmerized. Annie is struggling. I can’t hear it over the music, but I can tell she is screaming through her gag. He looks at the camera once more. Then he bends forward with the knife.
The rest of it is as Leo had said. A montage. Flashes of Annie’s torture, rape, horror. The knife is what he uses on her, and he takes his time with it. He likes to cut slowly, and he likes to cut long. He touches her everywhere with its blade. I physically jolt as each new image flashes. Full body spasms that make me feel like I’m being shocked by a car battery. Flash, shock, jolt, Annie getting tortured. Flash, shock, jolt, Annie getting raped. Flash, shock, jolt, he cuts, he cuts, he cuts, dear God, he won’t stop cutting. Her eyes fill with agony, her eyes fill with terror, and eventually they empty and fill with an endless gaze at nothing. Still alive, but no longer there. The killer is joyous, exultant. He is doing a rain dance, and the rain is blood. I watch as my friend dies. It is slow and awful and without dignity. By the time he is done, she is long since gone, a gutted fish. Watching her die, this woman I held as a child, this woman I grew up with and loved, it’s like being back in that bed, watching Matt scream.
I have not truly wept for Annie since she died. I find that I am weeping now, that I have been throughout.
They are silent tears, rivers running down my cheeks. They mourn the death of the only other person besides Matt who knew all of me. I am alone in this world. I have no roots, and it is unbearable.
Annie, I think—you so didn’t deserve this.
I don’t wipe them away. I’m not ashamed of these tears. They make sense.
The video finishes playing, and everyone is silent.
“Play it again,” I say.
Play it again, because there is a dragon inside me, and she is awakening.
I need her to wake up angry.
14
SO, LET ME get this straight,” Alan says. “He not only shot this video, he sat down and edited it?”
Leo bobs his head up and down. “Yep. But not on this computer. Hard drive isn’t big enough, and there’s no editing software on it. He probably brought a high-powered laptop with him.”
Alan whistles. “He’s a cold one, Smoky. That means he sat and edited the video while your friend was lying there dead, and Bonnie was watching. Or worse.”
No one has said anything about my tears. I feel empty, but I am no longer numb. I respond.
“Cold, organized, competent, technically proficient—and he’s definitely the real thing.”
“What do you mean?” Leo asks.
I look at him. “He’s crossed a line, as a person, and he’ll never come back from that. He loved what he was doing. It really made him come alive. You’re not going to do something you love that much just one time.”
He looks at me, taken aback by this concept. “So now what?”
“Now you all get out, and we get James over here.”
I hear my own voice as I say this, note its coldness. Well, well, I think. It’s started. It’s still there. How about that?
Charlie and Leo look confused. Alan understands. He smiles, not really a happy smile. “She and James need some space, is all. We have plenty to do in the meantime. You want me to take over for James at the ME’s?” he asks me.
“Uh-huh…” My reply is distracted and distant. I barely register it when they leave. My mind is a huge, open space. My gaze is fixed on the faraway.
Because the dark train is coming.
I can hear it in the distance, chug-a-chug-a-chug-a-chug-a, belching smoke, made up of teeth and heat and shadows.
I met the dark train (as I call it) during my very first case. It is a thing hard to describe. The train of life runs on the tracks of normality and reality. It is the train most of humanity rides, from birth to death. It is filled with laughter and tears, hardships and triumphs. Its passengers are not perfect, but they do their best.
The dark train is different.
The dark train runs on tracks made of crunching, squishy things. It’s the train that people like Jack Jr. ride. It’s a train fueled by murder and sex and screams. It’s a big, black, blood-drinking snake with wheels. If you hop off the train of life and run through the woods, you can find the dark train. You can walk next to its tracks, run alongside as it passes, get a glimpse of the weeping contents of its boxcars. Jump aboard, move through its corpse cars, through the whispers and bones, and you will reach the train’s conductor. The conductor is the monster you are chasing, and he has many guises. He can be short and bald and forty. He can be tall and young and blond. Sometimes, rarely, he can be a she. On the dark train, you see the conductor as he really is, underneath the fake smiles and three-piece suits. You stare into darkness, and at that moment, if you look without flinching, you will understand.
These killers I hunt are not quiet and smiling inside. Every cell in their body is an unending, eternal scream. They are gibbering and wide-eyed and evil and blood-covered. They are things that masturbate as they gobble human flesh, that groan in ecstasy as they rub themselves with brains and feces. Their souls don’t walk: They slither, they spasm, they crawl.
The dark train, simply, is where I remove the killer’s mask in my mind. Where I look and don’t turn away. It is the place where I don’t back off, or excuse or look for reasons, but instead accept. Yes, his eyes are filled with maggots. Yes, he drinks the tears of murdered children. Yes, there is only murder here.
“Interesting,” Dr. Hillstead had remarked during one of our sessions, after I had explained the dark train to him. “I guess my question—and my concern—Smoky, would be: Once you get on, what keeps you from never getting off the train? What keeps you from becoming the conductor?”
I had to smile. “If you see it—really see it—then there’s no danger of that. You can see that you aren’t like that. Not even close.” I turned my head to stare at him. “If you really unmask the conductor, you realize that he’s alien. He’s an aberration, a different species.”
He’d acknowledged me,
smiled back. His eyes didn’t seem convinced.
What I didn’t tell him was that the problem wasn’t becoming the conductor. The problem was to stop seeing him, how he looked in his unmasked state. That could take months sometimes, months of waking nightmares and cold sweats at dawn. The thing that was always hardest on Matt was that it was made up of silences. Closed rooms he couldn’t join me in.
That’s the price you pay for riding the dark train. A part of you becomes a solitude that normal people will never have and no one else can ever enter. A little sliver of you becomes alone, forever.
Standing here, in Annie’s death place, I can feel it rushing toward me. When it’s coming, whether I’m just watching it pass or moving through its cars, I can’t have others around me. I get distant and cold and…not nice. The exception is a fellow hobo. Someone else who understands the train.
James does. Whatever other faults he has, however much of an ass-hole he can be, James has the same gift. He can see the conductor, ride the rails.
Removing all the metaphors, the dark train is a place of heightened observation, created by a temporary empathy with evil.
And it’s unpleasant.
I look around the room, letting it seep into me. I can feel him, smell him. I need to be able to taste him, hear him. Rather than pushing him away, I need to pull him close. Like a lover.
That is the thing I never told Dr. Hillstead. I don’t think I ever will. That this, that intimacy, is not only disturbing—it is addictive. It is exciting. He hunts everything. I only hunt him. But I suspect my taste for blood is just as rich and strong.
He was here, so this is where I need to be. I need to find him, and snuggle close to his shadows and maggots and screams.
The first thing I sense is always the same, and this time is no different. His excitement at the invasion of another’s boundaries. Human beings divide themselves, create spaces to call their own. They agree between them to respect that ownership. This is very basic, almost primal. Your home is your home. Once the door is closed, you have privacy, relief from keeping up the face you show the world. Other human beings come in only if invited. They respect this because it’s what they want as well.
The first thing the monsters do, the first thing that excites them, is to cross that line. They peek into your windows. They follow you throughout your day, watching. Maybe they enter your home while you are away and walk into your private spaces, rub up against your private things. They invade.
And destruction of others is their aphrodisiac.
I remember an interview with one of the monsters I caught. His victims were young girls. Some were five, some were six, none were older. I saw the pictures of them before—bows in their hair and radiant smiles. I saw the pictures of them after—raped, tortured, murdered. Tiny corpses screaming forever. I was wrapping up, about to head out the door of the interrogation room, when the question occurred to me. I turned to him.
“Why them?” I asked. “Why the young girls?”
He smiled at me. A big, wide, Halloween smile. His eyes were two twinkling, empty wells. “Because it was the worst thing I could think of, darlin’. The badder it is”—and he’d licked his lips at this—“the better it is.” He’d closed those nothing eyes and had shaken his head back and forth in a kind of reverie. “The young ones…GOD…the badness of that was just so damn sweet!”
It’s rage that fuels this need. Not pinprick annoyance, but full-blown, world-on-fire rage. A constant, roaring blaze that never dies. I feel it here. As deliberate as he might want to be, in the end he destroyed in a frenzy. He was out of control.
This rage usually comes from extreme sadism visited upon them when they were children. Beatings, torture, sodomy, rape. Most of these monsters are made, by Frankenstein parents. Twisted ones create children in their own image. They beat their souls to death and send them out in the world to do unto others.
None of that makes any pragmatic difference. Not in terms of what I do. The monsters are, without exception, irredeemable. It doesn’t matter why the dog bites, in the end. That he bites and that his teeth are sharp are what determines his fate.
I live with all of this knowledge. This understanding. It is an unwanted companion that never leaves my side. The monsters become my shadow, and sometimes I feel like I can hear them chuckling behind me.
“How does that affect you, long term?” Dr. Hillstead had asked me. “Is there any constant emotional consequence?”
“Well—sure. Of course.” I had struggled to find the words. “It’s not depression, or cynicism. It’s not that you can’t be happy. It’s…” I’d snapped my fingers, looking at him. “It’s a change in the climate of the soul.” I’d grimaced as soon as the words left my mouth. “That’s some silly poetic bullshit.”
“Stop that,” he’d admonished me. “There’s nothing silly about finding the right words for something. It’s called clarity. Finish the thought.”
“Well…you know how land masses that are near the ocean have their climates determined by it? By that proximity? There may be some freak twists in the weather, but pretty much it’s a constant, because the ocean is so big and it doesn’t really change.” I’d looked at him; he’d nodded. “It’s like that. You have this constant proximity to something huge and dark and awful. It never leaves, it’s always there. Every minute of every day.” I shrugged. “The climate of your soul is affected by it. Forever.”
His eyes had been sad. “What is that climate like?”
“Someplace where there’s a lot of rain. It can still be beautiful—you do have your sunny days—but it’s dominated by grays and clouds. And it’s always ready to rain. That proximity is always there.”
I look around Annie’s bedroom, hear her screams in my head. It’s raining right now, I think. Annie was the sun, and he is the clouds. So what does that make me? More poetic bullshit. “The moon,” I whisper to myself. Light against the black.
“Hi.”
James’s voice startles me out of my reverie. He’s standing at the door, looking in. I see his eyes roaming over the room, taking in the bloodstains, the bed, the overturned night table. His nostrils flare.
“What is that?” he murmurs.
“Perfume. He coated a towel with perfume and stuffed it under the door so the smell of Annie’s body wouldn’t get out right away.”
“He was buying himself time.”
“Yeah.”
He holds up a file folder. “I got this from Alan. Crime-scene reports and photos.”
“Good. You need to see the video.”
When it starts, this is how it goes. We talk in short bursts, automatic gunfire. We become relay racers, passing the baton back and forth, back and forth.
“Show me.”
So we sit down, and I watch it again. Watch as Jack Jr. capers around, watch as Annie screams and dies a slow death. I don’t feel it this time. I’m untouched—almost. I’m detached and distant, examining the train with narrowed eyes. I get an image in my head of Annie, lying dead in a grassy field, while rain fills her open mouth and dribbles down her dead gray cheeks.
James is quiet. “Why did he leave this for us?”
I shrug. “I’m not there yet. Let’s take it from the beginning.”
He flips open the file folder. “They discovered the body at approximately seven P.M. last night. Time of death is rough, but based on the decomposition, ambient temperatures, et cetera, the ME estimates she died three days before, at around nine or ten P.M.”
I think it through. “Figure he took a few hours raping and torturing her. That means he’d have gotten here at around seven o’clock. So he doesn’t come in while they’re asleep. How does he get inside?”
James consults the file. “No sign of forced entry. Either she let him in, or he let himself in.” He frowns. “He’s a cocky fucker. Doing it early evening, when everyone is still up and about. Confident.”
“But how does he get in?” We look at each other, wondering.
Rain, rain, go away…
“Let’s start in the living room,” James says.
Automatic gunfire, bang-a-bang-a-bang.
We walk out of the bedroom and down the hall until we’re standing in the entryway. James looks around. I see his eyes stop roaming and freeze. “Hang on.” He goes to Annie’s bedroom and comes back holding the file. He hands me a photo.
“That’s how.”
It’s a shot of the entryway, just inside the door. I see what he wants me to see: three envelopes lying on the carpet. I nod. “He kept it simple—he just knocked. She opens the door, he slams through it, she drops the mail she’s holding. It was sudden. Fast.”
“It was early evening, though. How did he keep her from screaming and alerting the neighbors?”
I grab the folder from him and scan through photos. I point to one of the dining table. “Here.” It shows an opened grade-school math book. We glance over at the table. “It’s less than ten feet away. Bonnie was right here when Annie answered the door.”
He nods in understanding. “He controlled the kid, so he controlled the mother.” He whistles. “Wow. That means he came right in. No hesitation.”
“It was a blitz. He didn’t give her any time at all. Pushed his way in, slammed the door, moved right to Bonnie, probably put a weapon to her throat—”
“—and told the mother if she screamed, the kid would die.”
“Yeah.”
“Very decisive.”
Rain, rain, go away…
James purses his lips, thoughtful.
“So the next question is: How soon before he got down to business?”
Here is where it really begins, I think. Where we don’t just consider the dark train, we climb aboard. “It’s a series of questions.” I count them off on my fingers. “How soon before he started on her? Did he tell her what he was going to do? And what did he do with Bonnie in the meantime? Did he tie her up or make her watch?”
We both look at the front door, considering. I can see it in my head. I can feel him. I know James is doing the same.