Authority was a sham, a lie and a con. It was a sick and evil joke perpetrated by people who had power but had no intention of using that power to help those under them. Authority was supposed to be partnered with responsibility. There was supposed to be a duty of care, an obligation to protect those under your care.
But it never happened that way. He had learned early that those in authority would slide away from the responsibility side of the equation, covering their betrayal with a selection of nice sounding, glib phrases that were no more than excuses for their treachery.
His father
was
the first of
many to betray him.
He was a wealthy man, but his wealth wasn’t due to any effort or ability on his part. His own father had left him a successful chain of clothing stores that spread across four states. As time passed, this inherited success became an affront to his own ability and worth
—
possibly because he failed to grow the chain any further. The repeated attempts he made were failures and he dealt with failure in his own way. He punished his son for it.
Aged twelve, Matthew, as he was then called, became the target for a series of brutal, sadistic beatings. The fact that they coincided with his father’sincreasingly frequent business setbacks was lost on him. All he knew was that the man he trusted and looked up to had turned on him, seemingly overnight. The attacks were unpredictable but they came more often as the years passed. His father, failing to find satisfaction in his business career, found it instead in the physical domination and punishment of his son. And the small boy, who had once loved and respected him, grew to fear and hate him instead.
In some ways, his mother’s betrayal was even worse. She did nothing to protect him from the attacks. It wasn’t that she feared her husband. She feared the loss of her comfortable lifestyle if she opposed him
—
because she knew that if she intervened, her husband would cast her aside.
She resolved the situation in what was, to Matthew, a typically cowardly way. She arranged to have the boy packed off to an expensive boarding school. The problem wasn’t recognized or resolved. It was simply swept aside.
“We gave him the best education money could buy,” she would claim in later years.
But in truth, she gave nothing. She bought. Money gave her authority and she used it to palm him off on other people, placing him in the care of strangers who didn’t care. Who didn’t know him, didn’t love him. In effect, she passed her responsibility and authority on to strangers.
And they, in turn, abused the trust given to them, betraying him with false words and promises they would later recall from and deny.
He was one of the youngest boys in the school. He was a year younger than the stated minimum age but his parents’ wealth made up the difference. And he was a small boy
—
although you’d never guess that now to look at him. Small, weak and immature compared to those around him. The combination made him an obvious target for bullies, and there were plenty of those available. For a while, he suffered in silence. Then, lonely, confused and able to stand it no longer, he had taken his troubles to a teacher
—
one of the few who had shown him any attention and whom he trusted.
That trust was misplaced.
The teacher had taken him aside and told him that the solution to
his
problem lay in his own hands.
“If I were to punish them, Matthew, the problem won’t be solved. They’ll simply come after you again. You have to understand that bullies are cowards. If you stand up to them and fight back, they’ll leave you alone.”
He wondered briefly why, if bullies were cowards, they wouldn’t fear punishment from a teacher. Surely his punishment would be more painful than any
that
Matthew
—
small, weak, friendless Matthew
—
could inflict. But he trusted
the
teacher and next time the bullies confronted him, he defied them.
The result was the worst beating he had received from them. The teacher, seeing the bruises, smiled encouragement at him.
“They’ll leave you alone now,” he assured him. “They know you won’t take it anymore.”
But they didn’t. The pain, the beatings, the mental torture doubled and redoubled. And what made it worse was the fact that now he knew the teacher didn’t care. Knew he wouldn’t do anything to stop it.
He realized he was on his own. And the only way to stop the bullying was to be worse than the bullies themselves, to assume power over them. That’s how it worked. That’s the way it would work for him.
In wood shop he selected a two-foot piece of solid hardwood timber, using the lathe to taper it so that at one end it was a comfortable fit for his hand
,
while at the other, the main weight was concentrated. He could have simply stolen a baseball bat from the gym but there was something satisfying in constructing his weapon of revenge with his own hands. He hollowed out the thicker end, drilling a half-inch hole to a depth of about eight inches, then filled the gap with lead shot, topped up with rubber glue to form into a solid mass and hold it in place. The club felt good in his hands. There was a satisfying heft to it with the natural weight augmented by the lead shot. But it still needed something extra. He solved the problem simply by driving several bullet-headed nails into the wood, leaving them protruding half their length, so that, at the thick end, they stood out like small spikes.
Then he waited to catch the leader of the bullies alone.
The older boy never saw him coming. And after the attack, he saw less than he had before, as one of the protruding nails had slashed across his left eye, destroying it. In addition, he’d suffered a badly fractured skull and a broken wrist and forearm, where he had tried to defend himself. Two ribs were cracked and his body was bruised and torn from shoulder to thigh, where repeated blows from the club had smashed and ripped into him as Matthew continued to hit him long after he had ceased moving. He was found bleeding, half-blinded and unconscious, with fluid leaking from his ear, in the stairwell where Matthew had surprised him.
He remained in intensive care for a week, hovering between life and death. When, after ten days, he opened his remaining eye and spoke for the first time, he named his attacker.
Matthew was brought before the school principal, who interviewed him, flanked by two police officers. He faced them calmly, convinced that he had done no wrong. He had simply reacted to a situation and solved it as he had been instructed. He told them this. The teacher was summoned and questioned. Of course, he denied any responsibility for the savagery of the attack as Matthew looked on, watching first with disbelief, then with growing contempt. The pattern that would dog him through his life was repeated yet again.
“You told me to do it,” he said. His voice was calm and the statement was one of simple fact, not the sort of hysterical denial that might have been expected.
But, of course, the teacher denied it and Matthew was expelled, charged with attempted murder, a charge that his parents’ money and influence reduced to aggravated battery, and he was sent to a reform school. Even their intervention in having the charges reduced didn’t carry any weight with him. If they could have them reduced, he reasoned, they could have them dropped altogether. But that would have taken more money, which they obviously weren’t prepared to spend.
His reputation preceded him at his new school. He was regarded as unstable, unpredictable and someone to be avoided. That suited him fine. He wanted to be left alone. He began to fill out and grow
—
long, relentless sessions in the gym working with weights left him powerful and muscular.
He was obliged to spend three hours a week talking with a psychiatrist, in an attempt to bring some control to the violence that could well up in him so quickly. There had been several instances with other boys in the reformatory, all of them resulting in his victims left battered and bleeding. He went into these fights with an intensity and savagery that was disturbing. The doctor tried unsuccessfully to help him see the cause of the terrible anger that could seize him in these moments. It was all the more frightening because it was cold and calculating rather than hot-blooded and instinctive in its nature. The doctor began to sense his hatred of authority but never got a chance to reach the core of the problem.
They found Rawlings’s case notes afterward. The last addition stated:
Matthew is a deeply disturbed young man with a frightening tendency to extreme violence. He displays a hatred of authority and a total refusal to respond to discipline or instruction. Any attempt to direct his behavior is likely to result in violent and unpredictable episodes, When these occur, Matthew demonstrates a total abrogation of responsibility, choosing instead to level blame at those in a position of authority over him.
In the light of these notes, Rawlings should have sensed the danger. He was a small man, in his late fifties with a heart condition. Matthew by now was tall and muscular
—
belying his fifteen years. They found the doctor in a pool of blood, his throat slashed open by the jagged remains of a drinking glass on his desk. The ground floor office window, one of those few in the school that were without bars, was open. Matthew was gone.
Over the ensuing years, the pattern continued to repeat itself. But of course, when it did, nobody associated it with a small, disturbed boy named Matthew. He had long since disappeared, fading easily into the anonymous background provided by the constantly shifting tide of transients moving back and forth across the face of the country.
TWENTY-THREE
L
ee looked at the mass of computer printout paper that covered the table and flowed off the end onto the floor like a printed waterfall.
“I guess you haven’t got lucky yet,” she said dryly. Jesse looked up at her and shook his head wearily.
“You wouldn’t believe how many people got fired from this place in the last five years,” he said. “It doesn’t speak too well for our employment record.”
Lee flipped up the page nearest the end of the table and glanced at it curiously. “I guess we get a lot of transient workers in winter coming through here,” she said. “Ski bums and the like who want a nice easy job while they spend their time on the mountain.”
“Sure as hell looks like it,” Jesse agreed.
“So, does the resort keep a special computer file of people who’ve been fired?” she asked, scanning the names on the paper, hoping that one might, somehow, stand out from the others and say, “Here I am! Come and get me!” None did. Somehow, she wasn’t surprised by the fact.
“There isn’t a file that big,” Jesse replied heavily. “Denise came up with the idea of checking through all the employment files, searching for the phrase ‘pay in lieu of notice.’ This is what the computers turned up.” He waved a hand along the sheets of paper.
Lee frowned. “So we may not even have a complete list of people here?” she asked.
Jesse’s shoulders slumped at the thought of it. “Jesus, I hope so! There must be at least two hundred names on this list. Don’t wish any more on me.”
He was crossing names off as they spoke, running a thick black felt-tip pen through them. Lee watched as he’d cross out a name. Read, skip a few, then cross out another.
“You just eliminating them on the grounds of gut feel?” she asked. He looked up again.
“Women,” he explained succinctly. “At least we’re pretty sure our perp is a man. So I can thin this down a little to start.”
“Couldn’t the computer have done that?” she asked. “I thought those damn things could do everything.”
“Apparently not,” her deputy replied, scoring through another two names in quick succession. “Seems the records weren’t allowed to discriminate by sex.” He grinned at her tiredly. “And you can blame modern society for that, I guess. And they haven’t taught a computer yet to distinguish between a Cindy-Lou and a Billy-Bob.”
Lee allowed the ghost of a grin to touch the corners of her mouth. “Times I find that a little hard myself, the way the world’s going these days,” she said. Jesse gave a small snort of laughter, went back to his task again.
“You want to pass me half of those? I’ll lend a hand.” Jesse, without looking up, shook his head.
“Nah. I’m nearly done here. Thanks all the same.”
Whit, whit, whit, went the black felt tip across the paper as he slashed names away. He paused momentarily, frowning.
“Billy. Now surely that’s a man’s name?”
“I would have thought so,” she replied. “What makes you think otherwise?”
“The employer. Seems that ‘Billy’ worked for the Snow White Beauty Parlor and Nail Clinic.” He chewed the end of the pen thoughtfully. Again, Lee allowed herself the ghost of a grin.