Psychopath (30 page)

She eyeballed the length of Route 80 she had traced.  All told — Creston to Green River — it measured about 250 miles.  That felt like as much of a span as she could possibly explore in the next several days.

Part of her felt foolish trying.  There were a dozen agents poking around the area, and they hadn’t come up with a single lead.  There hadn’t been any real progress in the investigation during the past three years.  But something was different now.  Palpably different.  The killer had changed.  He had killed brazenly.  He had left a calling card at the Bitter Creek Diner.  And McCormick felt that calling card was meant especially for her.

She took a deep breath.  She was going to have to focus her search by making tough decisions from the start.  She was going to have to trust her intuition.

That intuition told her to start by ruling out the long-shot possibility the killer had known Pierce.  That meant interviewing her family and coworkers.  She’d also need to visit as many health care facilities as she could within the 250 miles she had identified as her hunting ground.  She knew one thing for sure:  the Highway Killer drew blood like a pro.  That might simply mean he had been an army medic like he claimed, but it might mean more.  He could be a nurse now or a phlebotomist or even a doctor.  And if this was his home, he had to have a pretty spotty attendance record while he crisscrossed the country.  Unexplained absences.  Out sick for weeks at a time.  Maybe fired for absenteeism by one hospital, hired by another, fired from that one, hired by a third, and so on.

She had to face facts.  There was no guarantee he wasn’t already in Texas.  Or California.  Or on his way to New Hampshire.  There was no guarantee he hadn’t been trained to draw blood twenty or thirty years ago by the Red Cross in Florida or Tennessee or New Jersey, never setting foot in a hospital.  But here she was in Wyoming, and the only thing to do, the only thing she could do, was simply start.  Finding one man along a stretch of highway 250 miles long was a shot in the dark, but it was her shot to take.

She stood up.  A little of that adrenaline high came surging back.  Her skin turned to gooseflesh.  It felt good to be on the road, on the hunt — just like the Highway Killer.

She drove back to Rock Springs, grabbed a couple slices of pizza at Papa Gino’s near the Days Inn, and checked in just before 7:00
P.M.
   She had unpacked, opened her file on the Highway Killer, and started to review the descriptions of the prior crime scenes when her cell phone rang.  Unknown Caller.  She answered it.

"Hey, Whitney," her father said.  His voice was smooth and low, mellowed by time like a rare scotch, flavored with a hint of his childhood deep in the Georgia swamps.

"Hey," she said, standing up.  She felt partly comforted hearing from him, partly embarrassed, even a little afraid — like a kid running away from home.  She sat on the edge of the bed.  "What’s up?"

"I just got off the phone with Jake Hanley."

"It’s not his place to tell you," she said.

"
You
didn’t."

She could see him sitting behind the seven-foot mahogany desk in the study of his farm in Potomac, Virginia, broad-shouldered and silver-haired, wearing a boldly striped Brooks Brothers button-down, pleated khakis, feet up, gazing out the towering, arched window that looked onto the dimly lighted brick patio where he had taught her to waltz before her ninth-grade formal, the same brick patio where he had held her as she cried at age nine after her mother’s death.  Sometimes she could still smell the cigar slowly burning between the fingers of his trembling hand that unseasonably cool evening, a hand that had seemed impossibly large to her, impossibly powerful.  "So what did he say?" she asked.

"He said you’d had a disagreement with the Agency on the Highway Killer investigation and decided to move on.  He said it was an honest difference of opinion."

Or else what? she thought to herself.  Or else you go to war for me, call in another favor, get some senator to lean on Hanley?  She half wanted to tell him she’d gotten taken off the Highway Killer case for having sex with Frank Clevenger, as if the shock of that revelation might finally make him see her as an adult.  "That’s right," she said.  "Honest disagreement."

"But worth leaving for," he said.

"Time will tell," she said.  There was a long pause.  It worried her.  "Dad?  You there?"

"You didn’t look at the
New York Times
today."

"No.  Why?"

"They printed another letter from the Highway Killer.  It caught Hanley and Kane Warner completely off guard.  They thought Kyle Roland would bury it."  He cleared his throat.  "There’s a good deal in there about you and Frank Clevenger."

McCormick could feel her neck and face flushing.  It was bad enough the FBI had learned of her relationship with Clevenger.  Now it was public knowledge.  Now her father knew.  She felt like a little girl caught necking, and that made her angry.  "They pulled me off the Highway Killer case because of it, because of...  Clevenger, which is bullshit.  So I quit."

"That was the ‘honest difference of opinion’?" her father asked.

"Pretty much."  She braced herself for a harangue about letting him down, about not mixing business with pleasure, about the importance of the McCormick family reputation, about the fact that being a McCormick meant you could never think only of yourself.  You had to set an example.  She’d heard it plenty of times before.

But she would not be hearing it this time.

"You’re okay, then?" her father said tentatively, his voice shedding its authority, warming up in the indescribably comforting way it could when he sensed his daughter really needed him.

She sat down on the edge of the bed.  "I’m okay."

"We could get a glass of wine at Mario’s place, talk in person."

"I’m not home," was all she could think to say.

"Oh."

She knew that sounded like she was at Clevenger’s place.  She didn’t want to leave him thinking that.  "I still have to empty out the office and tie up some loose ends on the investigation.  I want to download everything I can to Kane in the morning.  It’s going to be a long night."

"If there’s anything I can do, you know I will."

She knew.  She knew he would happily tie every loose end in her life and make everything seem all right.  But it wouldn’t be.  Because even if her father got Jake Hanley to reject her resignation, even if he got her reinstated on the Highway Killer investigation, she’d be left with the same question that had followed her as she’d followed in his footsteps from Andover Academy to Dartmouth (college for him, college and medical school for her) to the FBI:  was she a substantial person in her own right, or was she substantially the daughter of Dennis McCormick? "I’ll be fine," she said.

"Good night, then."

"Good night."

"I love you," he said quickly.  "Nothing could ever change that."

"I love you, too."  She clicked off the phone.  She sat there for half a minute thinking about what her father must be thinking, wanting to call him back, tell him where she was, tell him she was flying back home, back to him.  But then she remembered what he had said about reading the Highway Killer’s latest letter in the
New York Times
.  And she felt her energy start to build again, every hint of worry and fatigue in her body and mind vanishing behind a new wave of determination, powered by unconscious, surging tides of shame.  She felt hungrier than ever to find the Highway Killer.  Because now she had been publicly humiliated.  Now she had something to prove far beyond the gates of the FBI Academy.  She had something to prove to the millions of people who had woken up to the
Times
that morning.

*            *            *

Clevenger’s day had gone the distance, fifteen bruising rounds that included a sobering phone call with his attorney Sarah Ricciardelli, during which she advised him to gear up for a long and expensive custody battle, a visit with Billy that had started out badly, two run-ins with crowds of reporters manic with excitement over his reported romance with Whitney McCormick and his brawl with DSS, and a call from North Anderson telling him the last thing he wanted to hear:  that Anderson had found McCormick’s reservation to Wyoming, hopped a flight to D.C., spent two grand to fly eight rows behind her to Rock Springs, Wyoming, then booked a room down the hall from hers at the Marriott Courtyard near the airport.

His head didn’t hit the pillow until after midnight, and thoughts of Billy didn’t let him sleep until after 1:00
A.M.
   Billy was already feeling better, requiring less and less in the way of detox meds, which was good news and bad news.  Good, because the cocaine and booze and Ecstasy was quickly leaving his system.  His kidneys and liver were working well.  Bad, because some of his resolve seemed to be leaving him, too.

"They want me in Day Treatment for six weeks after I detox," he’d complained, pacing the room like a caged animal.  "That’s like half the spring."

"And you’re thinking that’s not long enough," Clevenger had said sarcastically.

Billy stopped pacing, looked at him with disbelief.  "It’s eight hours a day."

"Which leaves sixteen for you to worry about," Clevenger said, struggling to keep his voice down.  "Getting the drugs out of your body is easy.  Getting them out of your mind is a war.  You win that one in six weeks, you’re way ahead of the curve."

"Fine," Billy said bitterly.  "But I’m not telling anyone anything about me.  Everything I say goes in the medical record, which you know is gonna get turned over to DSS."

That was true, and part of Clevenger agreed the less Billy said the better, but he wasn’t willing to jeopardize Billy’s treatment, even if it meant a tougher case for Sarah Ricciardelli.  "No secrets anymore," he said.  "Tell them everything.  You have nothing to hide."

"I should leave this place right now," Billy said.  "We should just go home."

"What?"

"I can sit around at home just like I do here.  It’s not like they have therapy groups or anything."

Clevenger had heard the same rationalization from countless patients about to bolt from detox so they could drink or drug again.  But he didn’t think Billy’s addiction was the only force driving him out the door.  He thought he could hear a fear of abandonment playing in the background of his words.  "We’ll have plenty of time to be at home together once you’re discharged," he said.  "Leave now, and you leave us wide open to DSS claiming you’re not serious about getting well.

And if I let you stay at home with me, they’ll say I’m not serious about it, either."

Billy looked down and shook his head in the way he did when he was working up a head of steam to tell Clevenger and the rest of the world they could go fuck themselves, that he could take care of himself.  But this time he didn’t.  This time, he looked up and said, "We’re in a bit of a jam here, huh?"  Then he smiled.  "Don’t worry.  I’ll sit tight.  We’ll get through it."

Clevenger had smiled then, and he was smiling now, realizing how far Billy and he had come, how much closer together they had gotten.  And as he finally drifted off to sleep, he was thinking how strange life was, how it could serve you up the very best things and the very worst things right out of the blue, with no hint at all what was coming.

Part Three

the very next day

o n e

April 10, 2003

Just as Kyle Roland had promised, Clevenger’s response to the Highway Killer appeared on the front page of the
Times
.

Jonah picked up the paper first thing at the hospital gift shop and began reading through it the moment he sat down at his desk.

He had five minutes before his scheduled 8:00
A.M.
meeting with Hank, Sam, Heaven, and a woman named Sue Collins from the Wyoming Department of Social Services.  And in those minutes Clevenger’s words passed through the lenses of his eyes, were converted into electrical patterns on his retinas, sparked impulses that traveled the optic tracts of neurons leading to the occipital cortex of his brain, spread synapse-to-synapse to his limbic system and front lobes, and then were conveyed by means still completely unknown into his mind and, deeper still, into his soul.

In that cauldron a strange alchemy defended Jonah from the onslaught of truth in what Clevenger had written, and converted what should have been his grief, his shame, his primitive rage at his mother into fury at Clevenger for soiling an angel’s name.  And his hatred of Clevenger and Whitney McCormick and the rest of the hunters at the FBI crystallized hard as a diamond and pure as the waters of the mountains that were his refuge.

Clevenger had baited his hook again, casting about for someone who would remember meeting Jonah, remember connecting with him ‘immediately and intensely — in a way he or she would never be likely to forget.’  He had shed any pretense of trying to heal him.  He wanted only to catch him and cage him.

Even worse was the ‘prescription’ toward the end of the letter, Clevenger’s arrogant rejection of the root injury in Jonah’s life, his ignorant assertion that the sadistic father who had tortured him had never even existed:

Put this letter down a moment, close your eyes and picture the scene you described in your house, again.  Put your mother’s face on the person striking you, berating you, destroying your toys.  Can you even bear to do it?  And once you put that face on your assailant, can you remove it?  Or is it permanently affixed there by reality, by the truth the Highway Killer could never bear to see — that your mother was, like you, both darkness and light, good and evil, heaven and hell.

Jonah crumpled the page in his hand, squeezing it the way he would have liked to wring Clevenger’s neck.  And when he let go, both his hands curled into white, bloodless fists as he pictured Clevenger with Whitney McCormick, tucked away in some office at the FBI Academy in Quantico, ogling one another, pawing one another, stinking of sex, concocting toxic messages to him, trying to undo him, to drive him insane.