Psychopath (24 page)

With a trembling hand he took a folded sheet of paper and a pen from his coat pocket, unfolded the paper, and reread the beginning of his response to Clevenger:

Dr. Clevenger:

How does it feel to fall in love?  Is it the pure bliss they say it is to feel one’s ego boundaries melt away, to join another human being erotically?

Or is it simply another intoxicant?  Are you addicted to Dr. McCormick the way you were addicted to alcohol and drugs?  As an escape from your pain?  Is it really any better to lose yourself in her than in a bottle?

He took a long drink of his coffee, not noticing how it scalded his lips, mouth, and throat.  The woman behind the counter looked over at him.  "Everything all right?"  He smiled back.  "Perfect."  He picked up his pen and started writing:

The killer inside you shall not remain embryonic, but will walk the earth as the Highway Killer.  Every day I remain ill I will represent your unwillingness to love your fellow man, the limits on your empathy, your failure as a healer.  I shall cast not only my Shadow, but yours.

It remains more important to you to serve man’s law than God’s law, more important to catch me than to cure me.  Where is the Lord in that plan?  Do you really believe evil can be locked away behind bars?  Do you not understand that I am already inside you, that the struggle for my soul has now become a struggle for your own?

His vision had gone blurry, and he could feel his pulse bounding behind his eyes, but he pressed on:

You think you can avoid that struggle by submerging your heart and mind in the sex act.  You choose the huntress to avoid choosing a true self, to avoid the question that haunts you.  Are you — at core, in the darkest moment of your night — a healer or a hunter, my physician or my executioner?

I will help you answer that question.  Because I am — unlike you — a man of my word.

One by one, I would have returned each and every body to you, to be reunited with its family, but you have proven yourself unworthy, arriving in Utah with the FBI (after promising to disavow them), then lying about my offering in order to make me question my love for my mother, my defender, my angel.

To what end?  To leave me even more isolated?  To make death my only angel?  Did no one love you purely, Frank Clevenger?  Have you loved no one deeply?  Is it so impossible for you to fathom that emotion that you must denigrate it?

Your father lied to you, and you have become a liar.  Your father tortured you by raising your hopes, then dashing them.  You would do the same to me — were I to permit it.

I shall not, I shall not let you destroy me, nor shall I abide your self-destruction.  We were destined to save one another.  Staying true to that great journey is my path to redemption.

And I am yours.

—A Man of God

They Call the Highway Killer

Jonah set the pen down, gulped more of his coffee.  He believed he had indeed embarked on a great journey, but knew it was also a daunting one, no less so than the journey of Christ finding God inside him, then helping others find Him inside them.

The difference was that Jonah was determined to avoid the cross, determined to finish in this life the work that lay before him — even if that meant coming face-to-face with the devil.

*            *            *

He did not get to bed until 4:50
A.M.
, having driven another hour east to deposit his letter in a Federal Express drop box in Creston, Wyoming, then two hours back to the Ambassador Motel in Rock Springs.  He set his bedside alarm for 7:00
A.M.
, wanting a few hours’ rest and feeling oddly at peace, no terrible hunger to see his patients, the pain gone from his head, clear vision restored to his eyes.  He had said exactly what he had needed to say.  He would do what he needed to do.  He felt better than he had in a long, long time and fell easily off to sleep.

Having suffered for weeks with shattered sleep, he savored deep slumber, untainted by nightmares, and actually awakened refreshed.  Maybe he had turned a corner, he thought to himself.  Maybe God could see the effort he was willing to put forth.  Maybe he was finally on the right path.

He walked into the bathroom, turned on the light, and looked into the mirror.  And what he saw made him lose his breath:  his face and neck were splattered with blood.

He ground the heels of his hands into his eyes to clear away the illusion, but it kept staring back at him.  He shook his head in disbelief.  The man in the mirror did the same.  He reached out, tried to wipe him away.  But the man in the mirror reached out, too.  And as their fingertips touched, memories of what Jonah had done hours before began to surface.

He saw himself walk to the counter of the coffee shop, smile, and ask the woman whether he might use the rest room.  He saw her guide him through the kitchen, point to an open door.  And then he saw himself straddling her waist, his hands around her neck, her gray-blue hair fanned out over the pink ceramic tile floor.

He yanked his hand away from the mirror as if it were on fire.  "No," he begged.

But his reflection only mimicked him, and the images kept flashing through his mind.  He saw himself grab the woman’s hair and pull her head back, saw the blade of his knife power through her windpipe and pharyngeal muscles, felt the warm spray from her severed carotid arteries cover his face.

"It couldn’t be," he pleaded.  "Please, God."  He turned away from the mirror.

Panic gripped him.  Anyone could have witnessed what had happened in the diner.  Anyone could have spotted him driving away.  Someone in the motel could have seen him returning with blood on his face or noticed blood on his car.

Epinephrine poured from his adrenal glands, fueling him for the task at hand, but also driving up his blood pressure, painfully dilating the arteries feeding his heart and brain.

He grabbed his bloodied clothes off the floor, stripped the sheet off his bed, stuffed everything into a trash bag.  Then he showered, pulled on a clean pair of pants and a shirt, grabbed a wet towel and stepped out to the parking lot, expecting his X5 to be a mess and feeling relieved to find only a few red smears on the steering wheel.  He wiped them away.

He returned to the room trembling.  He began to pace.  "Calm down," he told himself again and again.  "No one is knocking at the door.  There is no police cruiser outside."

He turned on the television, flipped channels, and found what he was looking for.  A young, pretty television reporter stood in front of the Bitter Creek Diner, interviewing a man about fifty, with a pot belly and balding head, two days’ growth of beard on his ashen face.

"Sally worked here fifteen years," he said.  "I just..."  He cleared his throat.  "Nothing like this...  It’s a nightmare.  I don’t know what to say."

"No one had threatened Ms. Pierce, to your knowledge?" the reporter asked.  "There hadn’t been anyone suspicious at the restaurant?  A traveler?  A new employee?"

"Not so far as I know."

The reporter turned to camera.  "That’s it from here, J.T.   A brutal slaying in the quiet town of Bitter Creek.  A woman decapitated as she worked the overnight shift at the local diner.  No witness.  No known motive.  And police are refusing to speculate whether this is or is not the work of the Highway Killer."

Jonah clicked off the television.  He sat down at the edge of the bed, hugging himself, rocking back and forth, his mind pulling in too many directions:  guilt over what he had done; fear of being caught; sheer panic at having lost touch with reality, of losing control so completely that he had taken a life without even being conscious of it.  Then there was the terrible truth that killing had calmed him again, that he had slept like a baby after spilling a woman’s blood.

He had slept like a baby after spilling a woman’s blood
.  He heard his own thought through his ears, as though someone else were speaking it.  Was it God?  Was the good Lord promising him rebirth, even at this dark moment?  Or was he losing his mind?

He wanted to leave Wyoming that very moment, to climb back into the mountains to try to regain control, but he knew a sudden departure would raise suspicion.  The FBI would be searching the area, asking questions.  They might even show up at the hospital.  He had to stay focused, go to work as if nothing at all had happened.

He picked up his bottle of Haldol and swallowed a milligram.  He decided to take the medication three times a day, every day, to try to keep himself harnessed to reality.

*            *            *

As Jonah was watching coverage of the killing, Clevenger was driving Billy to the detox unit at North Shore Medical Center in Salem, about forty minutes north of Chelsea.  He’d gotten calls from Kane Warner and Whitney McCormick detailing the crime scene in Wyoming and asking him to attend a meeting at FBI Headquarters at 3:00 P.M.   Warner had sounded even more hostile than usual.  McCormick had sounded worried.  He’d booked a noon flight.

An intake worker named Dan Solomon, about fifty-five, his skin weathered and worn, a diamond stud in one ear, his eyes sapphire blue, interviewed Billy about his drug use and psychiatric history.  "Just marijuana and cocaine, then?" he asked.

"That’s it," Billy said.  He glanced at Clevenger.

"Is there more?" Solomon asked.

Billy shrugged.  "Ecstasy, occasionally."

"Would it be easier if I left the room?" Clevenger asked Billy.

"No.  Stay."

"Listen to me," Solomon said, his eyes glowing brighter.  "It doesn’t make any sense to hold back.  I know you think it does.  I used to lie to counselors myself.  It’s like you figure you’re here, you’re gonna get the full ten-day treatment anyhow, so what do you get for coming clean?  But remember this: 
coming clean is half the battle
.  Because what this really comes down to is becoming a truthful person — owning your pain, not trying to drug it away or lie your way through it.  Telling me everything you’ve swallowed or smoked or snorted or mainlined is a big step in that direction."

Billy glanced at Clevenger again, looked back at Solomon.  "Oxycontin, a couple times.  And I, uh...  I injected the cocaine twice."

Solomon stared at him.

"Three times," Billy said.

He kept the stare going.

"Smoked it once," Billy said.

"You used crack," Solomon said, jotting notes.

"Once," Billy said.

Clevenger’s heart felt like it was in a vise, but he tried not to show it.  "Is that absolutely everything?" he asked Billy.

"That’s it," Billy said definitively.

"I’ll take you at your word," Solomon said, "until you give me reason not to.  Fair enough?"

Billy nodded.

"Any history of depression?" Solomon went on.

"I don’t know if I have a history of anything else," Billy said.

"Ever hospitalized on a psychiatric unit or treated with medicine?"

"They put me in a hospital once," Billy said.  "After my sister was murdered."

Solomon didn’t break stride.  Like everyone else, he’d heard of Billy Bishop and the murder on Nantucket.  "Ever had thoughts of suicide?"

Clevenger hoped Billy’s answer would be "no," mostly because Billy’s prognosis would be better, partly because he couldn’t help feeling that Billy’s mental health — or lack of it — would be some sort of verdict on his parenting.  He had only been in Billy’s life a few years, but he wanted to believe those years had made a dent in Billy’s psychopathology.

"A couple times," Billy said.

The vise tightened on Clevenger’s heart, but he kept his game face.

"When?" Solomon asked.

"I don’t know," Billy said.  "Maybe when I got kicked out of school.  A couple times around then."

"And you thought of doing... what?" Solomon asked.

Billy shrugged.  "Overdose.  Inject a shitload of coke or something."

The image of finding Billy stroked out in the loft made Clevenger close his eyes.

"Sorry," Billy said.

Clevenger opened his eyes, saw Billy looking at him.  "You have nothing to be sorry for on that one, champ," he said.  "I’m sorry I didn’t ask you the question myself when you were that down."

"I wouldn’t have told you," Billy said.

"Thinking of hurting yourself now?" Solomon asked.

"No way," Billy said.  He remembered the thoughts he had had as Clevenger drove him to Brian Strasnick’s outpatient laboratory in Lynn to be drug-tested, the desire he had felt to make Clevenger suffer by watching him leap out of the car, hit the pavement.  He looked over at him.  "I don’t want to hurt myself or my dad, anymore," he said.  And he meant it.

*            *            *

Jonah Wrens showed up for work on time, at 8
A.M.
   He was wearing a starched lavender button-down dress shirt, perfectly knotted deep blue and lavender tie, trademark gray flannel slacks, kidskin loafers.  He walked into the nurses’ station, nodded good mornings to the unit secretary and the head nurse, and sat down to flip through the charts of the patients assigned to him for the next two weeks.

"Hear about the murder?" the head nurse, Liz Donahue, asked.

Jonah looked over at her.  She was a forty-something, twice divorced, childless woman who could have been beautiful, were she not bulimic.  "The murder?" he asked.

All the affability in Donahue’s face evaporated, leaving behind sullen eyes, hollowed-out cheeks, cat-thin lips.  "At the Bitter Creek Diner?"

Was he imagining the suspicion he heard in her voice?  He shook his head.