Anatomy of Fear (19 page)
“Yeah, I heard you were sick. How come you didn’t tell me?”
“Guess I didn’t think you cared.”
Oh, I care.
When he’d heard Vallie had cancer, all he could think was,
Maybe he’ll die.
“Guess you’re hoping I’ll die.”
“Something like that.” Denton laughed. “Just kidding.”
“No you’re not. But don’t get your hopes up, I’m in remission.”
“Yeah, I heard that too. Good for you.” It really was too bad about that clean bill of health. It would have made it so much easier, Vallie just dying. But now it was like he was doing the man a favor, wasn’t he? Eliminating years of decline, of possible pain and suffering. Really, it was for the best. “I bet you’ll beat this thing.”
“I intend to.”
“That’s the spirit, Joe.” It was absurd, all this bullshit friendly-enemy banter when Vallie was sticking a shiv into him, holding him up when the bastard was as guilty as he was. A part of him doubted Vallie would blow the whistle because it would send him to jail too, but what did Vallie have to lose?
Nothing.
Still, he couldn’t take any chances, a man in his position. “Honest, Joe, if you weren’t putting a gun to my head, I’d be crying.”
“That’s something I’d like to see.” Vallie laughed. “You know I got to get out of this dump, and I got that condo ready and waiting. I just have to make the payment.”
“You mean
I
have to, which I just did.”
“Maybe,” said Vallie.
Not maybe,
thought Denton. “Sounds real good, Joe, condo in Honolulu, some Hawaiian cutie to bring you a piña colada and suck your dick. Oh, sorry, I guess that part of you isn’t quite up to it anymore.”
“You’re such a fuck, Perry, but you always were.”
“Oh, come on, Joe, I was only teasing. We had our good ol’ narc times, didn’t we?”
“Plenty,” said Vallie. “Which is why I think so many other folks would enjoy hearing about them.”
Denton’s face hardened. He thought about killing his ex-partner right on the spot, save himself some money.
“See you soon,” said Vallie. “Real soon.”
Denton laughed and cocked his finger at Vallie as if it were a gun. “Not if I see you first, big kahuna.”
H
e lifts a Beck’s off the tray, eyes tracking the man’s wife as she makes her way around the room, lowering the tray for each of them. She disappears and returns with more beer, places it on a low Formica-topped coffee table, and her husband pats her arm the way you would a dog and she smiles.
He wishes his wife were more like this, checks out the matching sofa and club chairs, deep-pile rug, tan wood dinette set seen through an archway, shiny with Lemon Pledge.
A new man to the group, a guy in the military wearing sweats, who calls himself “Ethno,” short for “ethnoviolence,” says, “To be real masculine men you’ve got to do violence against the enemy.”
He recognizes that Ethno is quoting one of his
über
heroes, the current leader of the World Church.
“Tell your out-of-work friends and any kids you can to join the army, light infantry the branch of choice because the coming race war will be an infantryman’s war, remember that. The army is in desperate need for recruits, and where else can you get the fucking government to train you for free, right?”
This gets everyone’s attention, but after a few minutes the talk meanders back to cars and accounting, teaching and trivia, until
the host, who calls himself Swift, after the founder of Christian Identity, interrupts. He pushes up his sleeves, exposing small blue-black tattoos, swastikas, as so many of them have. “What we say in public is a lot different than what we do in private.”
As he says this he looks right at him and he wonders if Swift knows what he’s been doing. He would like to stand up and declare it, but sits there pretending to drink, hand gripping the can so hard it’s denting, fragments of pictures flashing in his mind, coming together and breaking apart.
Swift asks for contributions to support legal defenses for two men in prison, Richard Glynn and Duane Holsten, and tells them what Holsten did: “He killed his brother’s wife and baby because God told him to.” He looks around at each of them, and asks: “Could you make that kind of sacrifice?”
He knows he could.
After that, they take turns reading aloud from Madison Grant’s
The Passing of the Great Race
and Ben Klassen’s
Nature’s Eternal Religion
, and after that Swift leads them in the oath, though he can’t concentrate because those pictures of what he is planning next keep vibrating in his head, and after that everyone goes back to stories about their boring day jobs and he’s about to leave when Swift takes him aside and leads him into the basement.
Behind a metal door is a small cinder-block room, walls lined with guns and rifles, pistols and flame throwers still in their original boxes, a crate of hand grenades that Swift cracks open for a peek, and he feels a kind of tug in his loins and a wave of reassurance.
Swift says, “For when the time comes,” and in that moment he feels so close to the man he wants to tell him what he is doing because he knows he will understand, but decides it’s better not to.
T
he NYPD had combined efforts with the bureau, the results of which had produced reams of paper documenting America’s leading white supremacist groups. Terri had stayed up most of the night reading and by morning had reached the conclusion that mankind was hopeless.
She had arrived at the meeting with a throbbing headache, washed down two Excedrin with a cup of machine-brewed coffee, and though the headache had abated, her feet were now tapping, nerves jangling from caffeine overdrive.
The G could not dispute the fact that the locals had been supplying some of the best information—thanks to Nate’s detection of the logo from
The White Man’s Bible
—and Terri was feeling just a little proud for having brought him on the case.
She suspected Denton would have been happier if the PD had been taken off the case, full responsibility falling on the fed’s broad shoulders, but that was
his
problem. He was notably absent, some business with the city council, or so he said, though Terri could not imagine what could be more important.
Terri had invited Nate along with her men, anxious for all of them to hear if the Quantico profiler could add anything new to the case.
Collins gave an introductory briefing, basically what the NYPD had provided, then introduced the woman who had already snagged Nate’s attention, tall and slender, black suit jacket unbuttoned to expose her fitted white blouse, everything about her flawless except for her auburn hair, twirled into an ad hoc bun that threatened to topple, providing an unexpected louche touch.
“Dr. Schteir comes to us from BSS,” said Collins. “She has written extensively about the sociopathic mind, and published several articles on hate crime and its effects on—”
“Thanks,” said Schteir, cutting her off. “But I don’t think anyone gives a rat’s ass about my CV.” She flashed a quick smile, and Nate thought he’d fallen in love.
“I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to read the profile I worked up, which is in your folders, so I’ll summarize. We’ll first do a little Sociopath 101, and after that I’ll talk about the hate-crime component.” She glanced around the room, and Nate made a point of catching her eye and smiling.
Terri cadged a glance in his direction.
Dr. Schtier counted off on her fingers. “One: The sociopath is unable to give or receive love, though they can fake it quite well when they want to. They are unusually skilled manipulators. Many are the result of abuse and have learned to survive terribly sadistic situations by turning off their feelings. I am not making a case for sympathy, simply stating statistics. Two: They do not feel remorse or guilt like normal human beings. Three: They are egocentric, totally self-centered. These are the general rules—if one can even call them that—which are constantly shifting, and vary from individual to individual. Modern psychology is constantly reassessing them. One must always be prepared for a new manifestation and how the sociopath will exhibit it in a new and novel way.” Her eyes were shining; it was obvious that for Dr. Schteir, sociopaths were a sexy topic.
“I’ll stop counting,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. A sense of superiority. Very important. The sociopath feels he is better than you or me, better than anyone. He is above the rules of normal society, just one of the things that aids him in committing his heinous acts. On the other hand, it can be his Achilles heel. Arrogance can lead to mistakes, tempt him to tease the authority he disdains. It is not uncommon for sociopaths to get close to the press and to the police, as I’m sure you know.” She unconsciously plucked a comb from her hair, and her auburn locks tumbled to her shoulders.
Nate opened his drawing pad and started sketching.
“In the case of your unknown subject, there is no psycho-sexual release, though he undoubtedly receives pleasure from his acts.” She paused. “So, the hate-crime killer…generally, he regards his victims as lesser human beings, or not even human. It’s a tactic employed by soldiers, torturers, and sometimes even politicians.”
This produced a few laughs.
“But seriously…” She pulled her hair back and secured the comb in place. “It’s important to remember that he is driven by the belief that he is
right.
Just keep in mind a man flying a plane into a skyscraper, dying for a god and ideology he believes in, and you will begin to understand the kind of personality you are dealing with.” She paused to let that sink in. “There are two profiles in your folder. The supposition on your unsub, along with a profile I did two years ago on Duane Holsten, who is serving a life sentence at a criminal-psyche facility for killing eight people—four nurses and two patients at an abortion clinic. Holsten maintains he was doing God’s work, and therefore feels no remorse at all.”
Agent Archer raised his hand. “You said eight people. That’s only six.”
“The other two were his sister-in-law and her unborn child.
He slashed her throat before going to the clinic where she was scheduled to have an abortion.”
“So he had a motive,” said Archer, “other than God.”
“Yes, but he does not admit that his sister-in-law’s impending abortion provided any impetus for his crime. He avers that he had been consulting with God for some time, and that God told him to kill these people.”
“I don’t buy it.”
“It is indeed questionable, Agent Archer, an excuse for a hideous crime, and not an uncommon defense for hate-crime killers. But I interviewed Holsten over the course of a year and he never once changed his story. He is absolutely convinced he was right, that he was correcting an affront to God. When I offered the logical argument that
he
might be the one who offended God, since by stabbing his sister he had terminated a pregnancy, he told me I did not understand. He has never once wavered in his belief and continues to insist that God told him to kill, and therefore he did nothing wrong.”
“Nut job,” said Archer.
“You’ve got that right.” Schteir smiled. “As for your unsub, he may be choosing victims at random, or the acts may have a personal component. You may not discover that until he is caught.” She reached for a paper with the symbol Nate had found from
The White Man’s Bible.
“Though your man appears to be working solo, he is probably in touch with members of various hate organizations. This sort of personality derives strength from being part of a group. Duane Holsten was a member of both the World Church of the Creator and Christian Identity for at least ten years before his crime. Christian Identity is not an organized group, a shame because it would make our jobs a lot easier. It’s a loose-knit network of fanatics that stay in touch via Internet chat rooms. Hol
sten’s computer showed that he spent more than half his day in chat rooms. He had a basement full of neo-Nazi propaganda and three years’ worth of journals that documented his personal conversations with God—which is why he’s in a psyche ward and not on death row.”
“Couldn’t he have fabricated the journals after the fact?” Terri asked.
“Absolutely,” said Schteir. “And it’s possible, though Holsten convinced me he was speaking directly to God, something more than one religious-right sect is pushing these days. It’s called divine revelation.”
“Direct line to God,” said Archer. “Handy.”
“Indeed. This sort of man is determined and
righteous.
” Schteir looked around the room. “If you believed you were absolutely right—that God told you the world’s salvation depended on
you
—would you carry out his bidding? Would you dare
not
to?” She paused. “Holsten, as I said, feels no remorse because he was following orders. Sound familiar?”
Nate raised his hand and spoke simultaneously. “Nazis and neo-Nazis sharing the same excuse, right?”
Dr. Schteir smiled. “Yes. There is something in these men and in your unsub—rather something
missing
from their psyche and emotional core—that allows them to do what they do. They split their personalities, even their lives.”
“Are you saying he could be living a normal life?”
“I’d say a
double
life as opposed to a
normal
one, but yes.”
A
fter the meeting I stopped to talk with the Quantico shrink.
“Very interesting presentation,” I said. “And it sounds like you enjoy your work.”
“Oh, I do. I was never interested in having one of those comfortable practices—you know, dealing with everyday neurotics. Interviewing someone like Duane Holsten is a thrill. How many shrinks ever get to work with a true sociopath in their entire lifetime? Me, I get to do it all the time.”
“And it’s not frightening?”
“Oh, very frightening. Going into maximum security facilities, feeling all of those eyes on you—I can assure you that part is not fun.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, you are…?”