Psychopath (35 page)

Wasn’t that the profile of the Highway Killer?

"Dr. McCormick," Wrens said, "you seem tired yourself.  Why don’t we meet tomorrow?  Perhaps somewhere for breakfast?"

"No," she said. She flexed her calf to feel the gun strapped there.  "I’m fine."

She walked inside.

Wrens closed the door as she stepped past him.  And with her back toward him, wasting not an instant, he looped his belt around her neck and dragged her to the ground.

She reached for her gun, but Wrens kicked her hand away from her leg, then pulled the belt tighter, choking her, making her instinctively claw at the leather ringing her neck.  He straddled her lower back.  She felt his hand at her ankle, then moving up her pant leg and taking the gun.  He flipped her over, faceup, and jammed the barrel into her mouth.

He leaned close to her ear.

"What was your first question?" he asked.  He pulled the strap even tighter.  As North Anderson waited in his car outside the Ambassador Motor Inn, he imagined a very different scene unfolding in Room 105.  He had tailed McCormick as she followed a man — a very good-looking doctor, with a very expensive car — back to his motel.  She had knocked on his door, been greeted by him half-dressed, then disappeared inside his room.

It looked to Anderson like McCormick had maybe bumped into someone she went to college or medical school with and decided to try to recapture the past.

In any case, she was right:  it was none of his business.  And he certainly wasn’t about to mention it to Clevenger. 

He wasn’t about to get lost, either.  He’d have to be more careful tailing her, but he could pull that off.

He figured he had some time before McCormick hit the road again.  He looked over at the motel coffee shop near the exit.  He was starving, and it did feel pretty strange lurking out in front of that room.

*            *            *

Whitney McCormick awakened atop Jonah’s mattress, in four-point leather restraints, with Jonah staring at her from a chair beside the bed.  She struggled against her tethers, to no avail.  She twisted her wrist to look at her watch, saw she had been unconscious less than ten minutes.

"The FBI knows I was headed here," she said.  "You can’t get away — let me go."

Jonah smiled.  "Would you have let me go, had you captured me?"

She said nothing.

"You would have told me to go to hell."  He paused.  "Am I right?"

McCormick watched, wide-eyed, as Jonah opened his folding knife, held the blade over her face.

"Is there anything you want me to tell your father in my next letter to the
Times
, Whitney?" he asked her.  "I know I should consider him a coconspirator of sorts.  Certainly some flaw in his rearing of you contributed to you growing into a woman devoid of empathy.  Still, I’d like to do what I can to lessen his pain.  Losing his wife, then his daughter..."  He took a deep breath.  "How does a man recover from that?"

McCormick saw that Jonah was going to kill her.  Pleading would only embolden him, reinforce her status as a victim, his status as all-powerful.  She needed to take control, even while bound.  "This isn’t even about me," she said. "That’s the pathetic part."

Jonah placed the edge of the knife at her throat.  "Now that sounds like denial.  Trust me, when you feel your blood start to flow, you’ll know this is happening to you, no one else."

"This is about your mother, Jonah.  Frank tried to help you see it.  You’re just too much of a coward to open your eyes.  She was the one devoid of empathy — for you.  She tortured you."

He pressed on the knife, denting, but not quite cutting her skin.  "‘The Lord is my shepherd.  I shall not want.  He maketh me to...’"

Fear, rage and the will to live had the wheels of McCormick’s mind spinning like runaway cylinders inside a combination lock.  She felt as though her brain might overheat.

"‘He restoreth my soul.  Yea, though I...’"

Something clicked.  The boy who was murdered that day, killed by his mother.  It had truly rocked Jonah.  "Think about your patient who was killed today," she said.  "Don’t you see why it was so devastating for you?  You sent him home to die, Jonah.  You murdered him."

Jonah stopped his praying, shook his head.  "Sam died so I could see that you need to die.  He served God’s will.  He’s in heaven now."

"You knew what his mother was," McCormick persisted. "Deep inside, you knew exactly what was going to happen.  She had beaten him before.  She had never stopped.  It was only going to get worse."

Jonah pressed hard enough on the knife for the blade to break her skin.

McCormick felt lightheaded, but she knew she couldn’t let up.  "You failed that boy because thinking of what was about to happen to him would have put you back in touch with what happened to you.  The beatings.  You made yourself believe he was safe.  You probably convinced him he was safe, too.  You sent him into hell, in your place."

"Good-bye, Whitney."  He drew the blade an inch along her throat.  Blood began to trickle from the wound.

She felt like crying out, but knew that if she did, he would kill her immediately.  "I’m going to die tonight, Jonah.  Why would I lie?" She gathered her courage.  "You killed that boy."

He blinked nervously.

"Your mother is the force behind every killing," she went on.  "She’s the one you really want to murder.  And that’s why you’ll never be redeemed.  Because you would rather kill strangers than face the truth — she destroyed you, but you take revenge on others, because you’re still frightened of her.  You’re a coward."

Jonah moved the blade another half-inch along McCormick’s skin.  Her blood ran thicker.

"You destroyed that boy today."

"No," Jonah said, his voice shaky.  His eyes filled up as he thought of all the false promises he had made Sam: 
I can read minds.  You’re a superhero.  You have all the power
.

McCormick decided to take a final risk, to go on her gut again and try to crush Jonah with the truth, to force him into a psychotic state.  She remembered his first letter to Clevenger.  And she began acting out the part of his mother.  "Your little fucking day at the park!" she said in a grating voice full of anger.  "Did you have a nice birthday party with your goddamn friends?"

He looked even more pained.

She kept the pressure on.  "Where exactly do you think we’re supposed to find the money to pay for it, you little bastard?"

With that last word, Jonah’s face took a turn toward agony.

"And now that the damage is done you’re all apologies," she said.  "Well, I’m going to teach you a lesson.  Then you’ll really feel sorry."

He literally tasted the blood that had filled his mouth the day his mother slapped him to the ground, crushed his Hot Wheels cars.  He moved his tongue against his tooth, thought he felt it wiggle.

He looked at McCormick and saw his mother.

"You bastard!" she said.

He closed his eyes.  And he saw his mother holding open her arms, calling for him to come to her.  He remembered the feeling of warmth that radiated through his entire body at the sound of her voice when she was calm, the special blanket of contentment that only a mother’s love can spread over a child.  He remembered walking toward her, wrapping his arms around her, her arms embracing him.

But then another memory intruded, a memory of something he had felt — his mother’s body stiffening, her softness retreating, her arms extending, pushing him away.  And when he did look at her, he saw all the love had left her face, leaving pure hatred behind.  He saw her hand swinging, in slow motion, toward his head.

Then he saw something else, out of the corner of his eye — a man observing the scene.  A man not old and not young. Perhaps fifty.  A man close to his own age.  A man who shared his broad forehead and pale blue eyes.  A man just watching, neither celebrating Jonah’s plight nor protecting him.

He turned and glanced at his mother’s hand closing in on him, then looked back at her face, wanting to know why — why she would embrace him and then beat him, why she would love him, then rant that she hated him.  "Why?" he asked aloud.  "Why did you do it to me?"

McCormick looked up at Jonah.  She could see he had lost touch with reality.  "Because I’m sick, Jonah," she answered him softly.  "Don’t you see that?  I can’t help it."

A tear ran down his cheek.  Was it that simple? he asked himself.  Had Clevenger been right all along?  A schizophrenic mother.  A schizophrenic son.  Good and evil, darkness and light, healer and killer in one body?

Were his irresistible impulses to destroy and his extraordinary impulses to love no more than peaks and troughs in the dopamine and norepinephrine levels in his brain?

"I did the best I could," McCormick said.

Now Jonah was weeping.  Because he saw that he really had sent Sam back to his house to die.  He had pretended that Hank would choose his son over his sadistic wife.  But that was a fantasy. 

It hadn’t happened that way for Jonah. Ultimately, his own father had walked out, leaving him alone with the beast. He remembered it now the way he knew he had hands and feet, eyes and ears.  It was an undeniable part of him, a part long suppressed but now back in force.

Jonah hadn’t been rescued, and neither had Sam.

He had killed the boy trying to replay his own life story, trying to make it come out right.

He looked down at McCormick, saw his mother lying there.  And not just her face.  Her broad shoulders, her powerful arms.  "I can’t forgive you," he said.  "You should have gotten help.  You couldn’t expect me to cure you.  I was a child."

"I didn’t want to hurt you," McCormick said.  "I loved you."

"I wanted to love you, too," he whimpered, closing his eyes.  "But..."

"Please, forgive me."

He shook his head.  "Only God can forgive you.  You have to go to God."  He opened his eyes and looked back at McCormick.  And the mask of his mother slipped away.  He saw McCormick for who she was.  The huntress.  He grabbed her hair and yanked her head back, hovered over her.  "Do you forgive me, Whitney?" he asked.

She looked at the knife in Jonah’s hand, then looked into his eyes and saw her own reflection.  She didn’t say a word.

"Tell me you forgive me."

She thought of her father, of the crushing, unspeakable grief he would feel losing her, and she felt a tidal wave of rage swell inside her.  Rage as great as Jonah’s.  "See you in hell, you fucking bastard," she said.

He smiled, then laughed a horrible, demonic laugh that ended with him crying again.  "You’re not exactly cured," he said.  He shook his head, put the knife down on the mattress.  "Everything in time.  God is patient."  He stood up, walked to his briefcase and took out two vials and a syringe, carried them over to the bed.

McCormick saw the labels on the vials — liquid Thorazine and Versed, each a potent sedative.  In high dosages, they could be lethal.  "Don’t," she said.  "Please."

Jonah drew each of the liquids into the syringe.  He brought the needle to McCormick’s thigh, buried it deep in her muscle and discharged the contents.

"Goodbye, Whitney," he said.  "I hope you find a way to heaven.  And I hope I see you there."

Was he planning to kill himself? she wondered. A murder-suicide?

Her head felt heavy.  Breathing was becoming difficult.  She tried to think who would be the one to call her father to tell him what had happened to her.  And she hoped it would be Clevenger.

"It’s time for me to go home," she heard Jonah say.  "It’s time I stop running from the truth.  Thank you for helping me see that."

*            *            *

Clevenger had just hung up with another locum tenens agency, without a breakthrough, when his phone rang.  He picked up.  "Clevenger," he said.

"Kane Warner."  He didn’t give him time to respond.  "I started to follow up on the locum thing," he said.

"And?"

"Something turned up.  I’m not sure whether to bet the farm on it, but it feels right."

All of a sudden Clevenger was a member of the team again.  "Shoot."

"I had agents canvass eleven placement services on the east coast.  None of them sent a psychiatrist to all the locations where we found bodies.  Only one of them sent a psychiatrist to any of them.  One match.  And that psychiatrist happens to be a fifty-seven-year-old female."

Clevenger’s hopes sank.  Was Warner actually pitching the idea that the Highway Killer was a woman?  "That’s what you found?" he asked.

"Give me a break.  You think I’d call you with nothing?"

"I’m tired."

"Stay with me.  Here’s what we found.  One of the three agencies I called personally has a director who’s run the show twenty-odd years.  Staffpro, down in Orlando, Florida.  Wes Cohen.  He really got into the matching game, spent a couple hours going through his computer files.  When he called back, he said he had an answer for me — but not to the question I had asked him."

"Meaning?"

"He didn’t place a psychiatrist in any town near a murder scene.  But he was intrigued, so he ran a different search on his database.  He keeps track of when his docs refuse placements.  Five refusals, and you’re off his roster.  That’s his rule.  And he came up with one psychiatrist who turned down four of the towns where we found bodies."

"Four out of fourteen.  Almost thirty percent."

"What are the odds?  Maybe this guy wants nothing to do with the places where he claims his victims.  Maybe he thinks of them as scorched earth."

"Possible," Clevenger said.  It did feel right, but it also felt thin.  He got that sinking feeling again that he was way out on a limb.  "What’s this psychiatrist’s name?"

"Wrens.  Jonah Wrens."

Clevenger’s heart began to pound.

"Brilliant guy, but odd, according to Cohen," Warner went on.  "And get this — he spends almost all of his time between assignments mountain climbing.  Has all his mail delivered to his mother’s place in Montana."

Clevenger had started to pace.  "Is he assigned to a hospital now?"

"That’s the part that really got my attention.  He’s on assignment to Rock Springs Medical Center in Wyoming.  Fifty-one miles from Bitter Creek."