Psychopath (8 page)

"They found a bag of marijuana in your locker," Clevenger said.  "Can we at least agree on that much?"

"Yes," Billy said, still staring.

"Not your bag, though," Clevenger said, predicting Billy’s defense.  "You were just holding it for somebody."

Billy turned to Clevenger.  "I wasn’t holding it for anyone, either."

"What, then?"

"Did Walsh happen to...?"

"
Dean
Walsh," Clevenger said.

Billy rolled his eyes. "Did
Dean
Walsh happen to mention who tipped him off to look in my locker in the first place?"

"No.  He didn’t.  But it doesn’t—"

"You didn’t ask him very many questions," Billy interrupted.  "You just figured they’d caught me red-handed.  Period.  Guilty as charged."

Clevenger didn’t like the way Billy was trying to turn tables on him and maneuver him into the witness seat.  He especially didn’t like being accused of not sticking up for him, not after he’d laid everything on the line to save him from growing old in prison.  "If you’ve got a point to make," Clevenger said, "make it.  Otherwise, please skip the self-righteous bullshit so we can spend our time figuring out where to get you help for the drugs — if you’re using — and where you should finish school, if you intend to."

"Scott Dillard," Billy said smugly.

"Scott Dillard," Clevenger echoed.  Dillard was the leader of the trio who had been hounding Billy.  "Scott Dillard turned you in."

Billy nodded.

"So what?  Has he got the combination to your locker or something?  You think he planted the drugs there?  Give me a break."

"They don’t change the combinations year to year," Billy said.  "He must have gotten it from somebody who had it before me."

This whole discussion, Clevenger thought, was vintage Billy Bishop.  He was offering up a plausible, if improbable, explanation for the jam he was in.  It was the kind of defense that might go over in a courtroom, the punch line about recycled locker combinations delivered Perry Mason-style, which was probably what bothered Clevenger the most about it.  Billy always seemed to be banking on the proverbial shadow of a doubt.  "I suppose I can’t know for sure what happened," he said, "but..."

"I just told you what happened," Billy protested.

"What I do know for sure is that Auden Prep doesn’t want you back."

"They’re suspending me?" Billy asked.  "For how long?"

Clevenger looked at him.  Had Dean Walsh really not told him?  Or hadn’t Billy been ready to hear what Walsh had to say?  "They’re not suspending you, Billy.  You’re expelled."  The words didn’t seem to register.  "Dismissed.  Permanently," he said.

"Expelled," Billy said.

Clevenger watched Billy’s eyes get watery.  And the part of him that wanted to hold him, rather than hold him to any standard, started to grow.  But even with that impulse, he had to wonder whether Billy’s tears were genuine or contrived.  You couldn’t know with this kid.  He wasn’t just movie-star handsome.  He was a very good actor.

"Why don’t you at least ask Dean Walsh whether they change the combinations every year?" Billy asked.

"It’s not going to make a difference to him," Clevenger said.  "Maybe if it hadn’t been for the fights, but...  his mind is made up."

"Fuck it, then.  I’m done with this place.  I don’t care what Walsh thinks, anyhow.  I care what you think.  No one else."

That sounded like playing to the crowd.  "Sure," Clevenger said.  "I can see how you’re always looking to make me proud."  He shook his head, started the car, and backed out of the space.  When he glanced back at Billy, he saw him staring straight ahead, tears streaming silently down his face.

Clevenger shifted the truck into park again.  "Hey," he said.

Billy didn’t look at him.

"Here’s what I think," Clevenger said, in a calm voice.  He waited for Billy to turn to him.  "I’m in this with you for the long haul.  Got that?  Nothing you could do would make me walk away.  Nothing.  Not getting bounced out of Auden Prep, not selling grass.  So the only difference between telling me the truth and lying to me is that I can’t get you the help you need if I don’t have the facts.  I can’t be a good enough father to you without the facts."

Billy nodded.

"I’m going to ask one more time," Clevenger said, "because it’s important we both know the score if we’re gonna win the game here — were you selling drugs or not?"

"No," Billy said.

"Using them?" Clevenger asked.

"You can drug-test me right now," Billy said.  "And any time you want after that."

Clevenger looked into Billy’s eyes, to detect any duplicity there, but Billy’s gaze was as impenetrable as the space he had occupied on the Auden Prep defensive line.  "Okay," Clevenger said.  "I’ll make some phone calls tomorrow morning, and we’ll see whether Chelsea High School is an option.  That is, if you want me to."

"I do," Billy said.  "I want to stay in school."

"Good.  And I’ll take you up on that offer about the drug testing.  Once a week."

"Fine," Billy said.

Clevenger put the truck into gear, started out of the parking lot.

"I know you’re not proud of me," Billy said.

Those words cut through the last layer of Clevenger’s tough love to the soft stuff underneath.  He reached out and cupped his fingers around the back of Billy’s neck.  "It’s not that I’m not..."

"You will be, though," Billy said.  "You’ll see.  Even though things look bad right now?  You will be."

f i v e

Morning, February 22, 2003

En Route to Quantico, Virginia

Clevenger had put his meeting with the FBI off a day in order to settle Billy down and to visit with his friend Brian Coughlin, the superintendent of schools in Chelsea.  Now, headed to Quantico in the Crown Victoria sedan Agent Kane Warner had sent to pick him up at National Airport, he was thinking he should have canceled altogether and just stayed home.  Because all of a sudden leaving Billy alone in Chelsea felt risky.  And signing on with the FBI would mean leaving him alone a whole lot more.

At least Coughlin had come through for them.  Clevenger had met with him the night before at Floramo’s, a steak joint near Chelsea High, and hammered out a plan for Billy to continue his education starting the fourth quarter, in April.  To keep him off the streets until then, he’d gotten him a job with Peter Fitzgerald, the owner of the shipyard down the street.  And to keep him off drugs, he’d scheduled him for drug screens twice a week at the Massachusetts General Hospital satellite clinic in Chelsea.

He glanced at the dashboard clock of the Crown Victoria:  8:26
A.M.
   Just a few more miles to Quantico.  He wondered whether Billy had dragged himself out of bed yet, wondered what the chances were he’d get himself to the first of those drug screens by nine, like they’d agreed.

He thought of calling to make sure Billy was on his way.  But he worried that that kind of hand-holding would sap his will.

The sedan slowed as it drove through the gates of the FBI Academy, which shared a sprawling campus with the United States Marine Corp and the Drug Enforcement Agency.

The nerve center of the Academy was an interconnected network of nondescript buildings that looked like an overgrown corporation.  Recruits in dark blue sweat suits, with the FBI insignia emblazoned in gold across their chests, jogged along the road leading to it. Marines with high-powered rifles stood at every intersection.  Helicopter blades beat the air.  A palpable sense of mission, grandeur, and secrecy permeated the place.

Clevenger felt two things, at odds with one another.  The first was suspicion.  He distrusted institutions, even law enforcement institutions, because their very size and structure could stifle the three things he valued most in the world:  courage, creativity, and compassion.  Those were three qualities a person needed to find inside him or herself, sometimes searching his or her soul for decades before finding them — if ever.  Being part of an organization made the search harder, not easier.  A failure of courage or creativity or compassion could be shared by the group, allowing each member to escape the full measure of guilt that ought to derive from things like cowardice or cruelty.

But the second feeling Quantico inspired in Clevenger was a kind of reluctant pride.  The Bishop case had made him a celebrity, but it hadn’t won him any stamp of approval from the law enforcement community.  If anything, the fact that he’d embarrassed the Nantucket Police Department and Massachusetts State Police by proving Billy innocent had made him more of an outsider, not less.  Now the FBI was coming to him for help.  The federal government was coming to Frank Clevenger, one half of a two-man operation in oil-soaked Chelsea.

Clevenger was escorted through two sets of security doors, down a long hallway, then through a third set of security doors and into an elevator which descended six floors to the Behavioral Sciences Unit, or BSU.  The elevator opened onto a shiny, hardwood hallway, lighted by hanging brass fixtures, with portraits of former FBI notables in gilded frames lining the walls.

A tall man with brown, wavy hair and bright white teeth stepped in front of the open elevator doors.  "Dr. Clevenger," he said, in a raspy voice that came across even less friendly than it had over the phone, "I’m Kane Warner.  Welcome to the Academy."

Clevenger stepped out, shook Warner’s hand.

"Your trip went smoothly?" Warner asked, trying not to show how taken aback he was by Clevenger wearing what he always wore — blue jeans and a black turtleneck.

"No trouble," Clevenger said.

Warner smiled, flashing his gleaming teeth.  He was handsome, late thirties, with high cheekbones, an unmistakably healthy hue to his skin, and bright green eyes — a Ken doll decked out in a dark gray, pinstriped suit and red silk tie.  His shirt was as white as his teeth, pristinely pressed and starched.  "Everyone’s waiting in the conference room," he said.

Clevenger followed Warner down the hallway.  "Quite a campus," he said.

"Three hundred eighty-five acres?" Warner said, delivering his statement as a question, the way he had on the phone.  "Self-contained.  A city unto itself.  Classrooms?  Dorms?  Dining hall?  Library?  A thousand-seat auditorium?  Eight firing ranges?  Four skeet ranges?  A one-point-one mile racetrack for defensive and pursuit driving?  Hogan’s Alley?  It’s all here."

"Tell me about Hogan’s Alley?" Clevenger asked.

"A mock town," Warner said.  "For hostage rescue training, that sort of thing?"

"Handy," Clevenger said.

"Very."  He stopped in front of a set of double doors.  "I hope you decide to join us in this," he said.

Clevenger gave Warner a mirror image of his own wide smile and left it at that.

Inside the conference room, two women and three men sat around a long, polished mahogany table.  A backlighted, computerized map of the United States glowed on the wall, thirteen red dots shining along the highways where victims of the Highway Killer had been found.  Warner took a seat at the head of the table and nodded for Clevenger to take the seat next to him.  "Let’s start with introductions," Warner said.  "I think everyone is familiar with Dr. Clevenger’s background," he said to the group.  He glanced at Clevenger, then nodded in turn at each person around the table.  "Dorothy Campbell, who works with our PROFILER computer system; Greg Martino, an analyst with VICAP, the Violent Crime Apprehension Program; Bob White and John Silverstein, from our Criminal Investigative Analysis Program, CIAP; Dr. Whitney McCormick, our chief of forensic psychiatry; and Ken Hiramatsu, our chief pathologist."

Clevenger’s eyes were still on Whitney McCormick when Hiramatsu was introduced.  She was no more than thirty-five, slim and very pretty, with long, straight blonde hair, and deep brown eyes.  She looked completely at ease, entirely self-confident, yet the way she held her head and the way she looked at him, even the pale rose lipstick she wore, made him sense that she had not surrendered her femininity, that the sensitivities and intuitions that were her birthright had survived medical training and FBI training and all the horrors she had to have seen on the job.  That was quite a feat.  Even as he forced his eyes over to Hiramatsu, McCormick’s image stuck with him.  He was that vulnerable to feminine beauty.  Almost permeable.  His commitment to fathering Billy the past year had done a lot to keep women out of his bedroom, but it hadn’t done a thing to get women off his mind.  "Nice to meet everyone," Clevenger said, making eye contact with each person around the table, then letting his gaze return to McCormick for a few seconds.

"Why don’t we start with an overview, Bob?" Kane Warner asked.

Bob White, serious, somber, about forty, looked up at the lighted map on the wall.  "First, the stats, which I trust you already know, Dr. Clevenger:  Thirteen bodies.  Eight men.  Five women.  Each found within ten yards of a highway, in a shallow grave or simply dumped on the ground.  No attempt to disguise their identities."  He stood, opened a folder and took out a short stack of photos.  He spread them on the conference table and began listing the towns where the victims had been found.  "Carlhoun, Alabama; Patterson, Idaho; Bellevue, Iowa; Brownsville, Kentucky; Northfield, Maine..."

Clevenger looked at the display of carnage.  Thirteen bodies, limbs poking up through the soil, through leaves, through snow, others simply sprawled on the ground.  Thirteen victims.  He felt their absolute terror, the awful recognition that their lives were being cut short, that they were dying without any chance to reach out to the people they loved, without the chance to say good-bye, to voice regret or a final thank-you.

"They were all fully clothed, some faceup, some facedown," White was saying.  "No discernible pattern as to age or race or gender.  No consistency in terms of where they’re from or where they were going.  Their throats were all cut, but using different implements.  Some of the wounds were inflicted with a short blade, like a carpet knife, others were inflicted with a long blade, like a pocket knife or steak knife."  He paused.  "The perp doesn’t seem methodical.  Not a lot of planning here.  He kills spontaneously.  It doesn’t matter who you are.  And he isn’t on a cross-country journey, because the chronology of the killings puts him north, south, east, west, without any discernible rhyme or reason."  He nodded toward the picture furthest to Clevenger’s right.  "You can be an old woman."  He nodded toward the picture furthest to Clevenger’s left.  "Or a sixteen-year-old boy.  You can be black or white, young or..."