Deviant (32 page)

He screwed the top back on his marker pen and brewed his coffee.

He walked to the guardhouse and asked Officer Rodriguez if he could borrow his
Denver Post
.

“Sure,” Rodriguez said—it was only a formality. The
Denver Post
came for the prison and Rodriguez never read it. Bob got the paper, tucked it under his arm, and walked back to his cell, looking at the mountain.

He thought about Danny. He had heard what had happened to him and he thanked God he'd told Walt about his suspicions.

Kids always did the dumbest things possible.

If Walt hadn't followed him …

Danny's story had been in the Saturday
Post
and a little
bit in the Sunday
Post
, but in today's paper, the Monday edition, there was only a statement that the investigation was “ongoing.”

So the killer was still out there. Or the copycat, if you preferred the FBI's version of events.

“Kids,” Bob said to himself. Danny's plan had been good, but it had gone wrong and he had nearly died. He was lucky to be alive.

Bob sat on the edge of his bed. The coffee cooled. Grew cold. Time passed.

“Phone call for you, Bob,” Officer Rodriguez yelled from the guardhouse.

He ran to the guardhouse, thanked Rodriguez, and took the phone.

“Hi, Bob, it's Walt. I guess I will be coming out today after all. So you better tell your boys.”

“I thought you were staying home with Danny?” Bob said.

“Yeah, that's what we thought. But Danny wants to go to school. ‘No special treatment,' he says. And you know what the funny thing is? He has to go in early because he's got detention with Mr. Lebkuchen. Can you believe that kid? He should be going to the White House to see President Obama. He is some special kid, huh?”

Bob laughed. “Yeah.”

“Anyway, so you better tell your boys to get the work detail sorted. I'll be over presently.”

“OK, Walt, I'll see you in a little bit.”

Bob hung up the phone and gave it back to Officer Rodriguez, then he told him that they were going to need to authorize the chain gang after all.

Officer Rodriguez wasn't happy. “First you say it's on, then you say it's off, and then you say it's on again …”

But Bob knew Rodriguez didn't really care. Chain-gang work counted as “hardship duty,” and you got double time for that.

Bob went back to his cell and stared at the mountain.

“Forty-one days and I'll never see you again,” he said with a chuckle.

He looked at the picture in his cell of
Hunters in the Snow
, and he looked at the empty space on his wall where someone had taken one of his postcards, and he looked at all those gloomy books on serial killers on his bookshelves.

“I'm going to leave all of those here. I never want to see them again either,” Bob said to himself, and he climbed up to his bunk.

After a few minutes he found that his brows were knitting together. His foot was tapping. Something was troubling him. What was the matter? Something he ate? No, he hadn't even had chow yet.

No, it was, it was … something Walt had said, something about—

Danny?

No.

The work gang today?

No.

What was it, then?

A name. President Obama, no, the—

Mr. Lebkuchen. Yes.
Lebkuchen
.

He'd read it in the paper, of course, but Walt saying it out loud like that had made it resonate in his mind. He'd seen that name before somewhere.

Where?

In one of his books, that's where!

He'd seen it here in this cell … Where? He snapped his fingers. When that weird kid, that friend of Danny's, had left the
Encyclopedia of Serial Killers
open at the letter L!

Bob took the grisly
Encyclopedia of Serial Killers
from the shelf and thumbed through the index.

“Leba … Leber … Lebkuchen, Arthur J., page 466.”

Bob turned quickly to the page. It was only a one-paragraph entry:

 

Arthur John Lebkuchen, Staff Sgt. US Army, 1948–1988. Staff Sergeant Lebkuchen was accused of killing a fellow soldier while serving at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, Japan, in a dispute over the ownership of a stray cat. Lebkuchen hung himself before trial. Lebkuchen cannot be considered a true serial killer since there was only one victim. Although in a bizarre echo of his crime for several weeks after his death, Kadena AB was inundated with dead cats.

 

Bob read the paragraph again and shut the book. “I
thought it was a kid!” he said aloud. “I thought it was a kid and I was wrong.” It wasn't a kid. It was an adult whose emotions had been arrested in childhood. Bob tossed the book, jumped off his bunk, and ran to the guardhouse just as Walt was arriving.

He climbed into Walt's car.

“Rodriguez, sign me out!” Bob yelled.

“What's going on?” Walt asked.

“We've got to get to the school! We'll be there before the cops can get up from Colorado Springs!”

“What's the matter?” Walt asked.

“Drive to the school! I'll call the cops on your cell phone and have them meet us there!”

“What is going on?”

“I'll explain on the way! Drive!”

On the other side of Cobalt, Colorado, Danny became aware of a faint siren in the distance.

“What is that?” he would've liked to have asked, but of course in school no talking was allowed.

He studied the math problem in front of him.

“If John and Mary have six apples and Mary and Tania have three apples, how many apples belong to—”

“Daniel,” Mr. Lebkuchen said.

“Yes?”

“Can you help me with something?”

“What?” Danny said, still not entirely sure if he was allowed to reply or not.

Mr. Lebkuchen was standing next to the big machine that was covered in tarpaulin at the back of the classroom.

“Can you help me lift this?”

“Sure,” Danny said.

They pulled the tarp off the enormous Tesla coil.

Danny was impressed by the machine. It was like a mad scientist's experiment kit in an old black-and-white movie. Two tall, terrifying-looking electrodes with thick wires coming from them and a spark box where raw electricity would leap between the electrode poles.

“What do you think of that?” Mr. Lebkuchen said.

“It's cool,” Danny said.

“Wait till you see what it looks like when it's plugged in.”

Lebkuchen fumbled with a dazzling array of plugs and then pulled a large lever that said, clearly,
DO NOT PULL
.

For a minute there was a humming sound that increased in decibels until, suddenly, blue fire leaped between the electrodes.

“My God,” said Danny. “Are you sure we should be messing with this thing?”

“I didn't do anything, Danny,” Lebkuchen said innocently.

“Sure you did. You just turned it on.”

Mr. Lebkuchen laughed. “
I
didn't touch it. I left you alone in here and you must have turned it on. I should never have trusted you after what happened with the gas taps, but you seemed to have really grown up since then. I was in my office, getting some paperwork. I heard a scream, I came running, but unfortunately you were already dead.”

A chill went through Danny.

He looked at Mr. Lebkuchen, who had that little smile on his face that did not always mean that something was funny.

“Are you joking?” Danny asked.

“Unfortunately for you, Danny, not this time, no.”

Danny looked for an exit, but the windows were closed and Lebkuchen had locked the only door.

“Why?” Danny said.

“It was only a matter of time, Danny. You were bound to recognize me sooner or later. Really, I was lucky to get you in here so soon. You're such a good boy, insisting on no special treatment. I could have laughed out loud when you said that. You should have seen me running out of that hospital room with some nonsense about TV. Of course, I would have found another pretext to get you alone in here, because you could have blabbed at any time.”

“I didn't get a good look at you.”

“I'm afraid I can't take any chances.”

“What are you going to do?” Danny asked.

Mr. Lebkuchen frowned. “Oh, don't worry. I'm not a complete sadist. It will be quick. I'll throw you between the poles and those things are charged to twenty thousand volts.”

“What will happen to me?” Danny said.

Lebkuchen shook his head and laughed. “You'll be killed instantly, of course. Electrocuted, burned—it will all be over in a second. Like the other night, when I hit you with the Taser. But this will be much cleaner. It will be a win-win for
everyone. You'll be dead, I'll have completed the pentagram, and we'll get rid of this ghastly Tesla device, which has been clogging up this room since we opened this school. It was endowed to the old school by the Ford Foundation, so we can't really get rid of it without a reason.”

Danny feinted to the left and tried to make a run for the door, but Lebkuchen was watching him like a city cat watches a country mouse and he feinted at exactly the same time.

“You can scream if you like; we're pretty well soundproofed and there's no one around here this early,” Lebkuchen said.

“I'm meeting Tony. She's going to be here any minute.”

“In a minute you're going to be dead!” Lebkuchen laughed.

“Just let me go, I won't say anything.”

“You won't say anything? Ha! Look, Danny, you might as well compose yourself. There's no escape. I won't tell you to pray because, well, I suspect your soul will be taken by the demons.”

Danny swallowed hard. “Demons?”

“Of course. Why do you think we're doing all this?”

“Because you're nuts?”

Lebkuchen grimaced. “That's what they always call those who see farther than others. Our world is controlled by beings more powerful than you will ever be able to comprehend. We are mere shadows, you and I. It has all been explained to me and now I understand.”

“But—but why me?”

Mr. Lebkuchen shook his head impatiently. “Because you'd have recognized me, or more likely my voice, sooner or later. I was talking to myself the other night. I've always said far too much. Talking … it gets you into trouble. I used to have a stutter, but my voice coach helped me get rid of that. My old dad used to say to me, ‘Children should be seen and not heard.' That's what he said. He believed that. He was old-school.”

“And why the cats? They can't talk.”

Lebkuchen blinked as if momentarily thrown.

Behind them the Tesla coil fizzed and spat like a monster in a cage.

“Well, that's the whole thing, of course, Danny. I need to be better. This machine is a good metaphor. I need to draw the power from the earth. Do you see?”

“No.”

“We're making an exchange with the underworld. The cats and a child for more life. The Master told me this. But the cats first. Cats feed the demons. Everyone knows that. The Ute knew it. The Egyptians knew it.”

Danny nodded calmly. “You know that doesn't make any sense at all?” he said.

“It makes sense to me,” Lebkuchen said, removing his jacket and flexing his arms. He was small but wiry and strong.

“Seriously, did you ever consider the possibility that you might just be completely insane?” Danny said.

Mr. Lebkuchen shook his head. “Me, insane? I run the best school in the state. Maybe the country. Look at my results. I'm going to be on the Oprah channel. Michelle Obama is going to visit us later in the year. And then what? Who knows where I could go! We need more schools like CJHCS. We need Direct Instruction. The silent system. The Chinese are getting ahead. Do you read Tom Friedman? I could be the savior of America. If I live. Education secretary, perhaps? Yeah, I know its only education secretary, but it's a Cabinet posting. It's nothing to be sneezed at. And when you look where I came from … Of course, yes, the FBI will turn up all that old stuff in their background check. I know what you're saying. So maybe I should lie low for a few years, maybe you're right, keep my head down, k-keep out of the h-headlines.”

His eyes had glazed over and the stutter had returned to his voice. Mr. Lebkuchen was one of those people who could compartmentalize their insanity most, if not all, of the time. They could pass for sane, only letting it out with those they trusted or those they thought were worthless. Since he was about to die, Danny figured he obviously fell into the latter category.

“But you're an intelligent man … You've got to know that there are no demons,” Danny said.

Mr. Lebkuchen rubbed his chin and danced from foot to foot. “I am not an expert in demonology. The Master is. That's why we must complete the pentagram. It's a pity we won't complete the pentagram in order. A human child
should have been last, but I don't think that matters too much.”