2013: Beyond Armageddon (13 page)

Price reached into a coat pocket. “You liked cream and sugar, as I recall.” He laid a napkin on the bench and placed a handful of creams and sugars and a wooden stirrer on top of it.

“Good memory,” Zeke said.

“Yes.”

Zeke busied himself fixing his coffee. “This is bizarre on a cosmic scale.”

“Absolutely.”

“Of all the gin joints in all the world, you had to walk into mine.” Zeke said it utterly without humor and made no attempt to imitate the voice.

Price’s face remained expressionless. “Bogart.
Casablanca
. Very apt.”

Zeke put the lid back on his coffee and cradled his hands around the cup to warm them. “So. By what sadistic swipe of the Grim Reaper’s scythe do you happen to be the one called in on this case?”

“I’ve come to be considered an expert in the study of Satanic murders. This guy adamantly claims he was doing the Devil’s work. The prison doctors were getting nowhere, so they called me in to see if I can get inside his head.”

“Have you seen him yet?”

“No. I just got in last night. I’m interviewing him tomorrow morning. That’s why I called you so early. I wanted to let you know personally, before you saw it on the news. I didn’t want you to think I’d just waltz into something like that without giving you a heads up.”

They stared at one another. Price was being a standup guy about this, Zeke had to give him that. “So,” he said, “you’re an expert on ‘the Devil made me do it’ murderers. How did that come about? Other than from your first-hand knowledge of having been one.”

For the first time Price broke eye contact, looking in the general direction of his shoes. Unexpectedly, Zeke felt a twinge of remorse for making the remark. The feeling was quickly chased by anger at feeling sympathy for a mass murderer who had gotten off scot-free.

“I deserved that,” Price said. “And a lot more.” He glanced toward the Wall, then back at Zeke. “When we got out, I did a lot of soul-searching. I kept asking myself about the voice in my head that night, urging me to kill that family for lying. I couldn’t be sure I’d heard one. Or if I did, whose it might have been. For a while I told myself it was the voice of Satan, then I told myself it was Randy Stokes, my childhood friend who had enlisted when the Vietnam War was still going on. But I finally had to admit that was nonsense. It could have been me, in my own crazed mind, just yelling to shoot.”

Price looked as uncomfortable telling it as Zeke was hearing it. A few grainy snowflakes swirled past.

“What’s the story on this Randy Stokes? You yelled out his name that night.”

Price looked away again, searching for words to exhume a buried skeleton. As he told the story, his gaze kept drifting inward.

“Randy Stokes was my best friend. His family lived directly behind us. If you hopped our fence you were in their yard. We were born on the same day—July 2nd. It was inevitable that we’d become friends, I guess. We were inseparable. Our parents used to joke that we were more like twins than twins. Whenever we could, we took the same classes, played on the same teams, all of that.

“Anyway, when we graduated from high school in 1972, the Vietnam war was intense. With our birthdays being so close to July 4th, we’d practically been raised to be patriots, so naturally we decided to enlist as soon as we could. Our 18th birthdays fell on a Sunday, so we went down to the recruitment office the next day.”

He looked in the general direction of the Wall again, and Zeke could see that the bad part was coming. Price’s expression hardened, as if to dam up some painful emotion.

“Randy went into the recruiter’s office while I waited in the reception area. By the time he came out I had…changed my mind, would be the nice way to say it. Turned chicken shit was more like it. I had hung my best friend out to dry. The look of betrayal in his eyes was the most painful thing I’ve ever seen. And I’ve looked into the eyes of some of the worst killers on the planet.”

Zeke’s eyes bore into him. “So you were trying to atone for what you’d done by convincing yourself he was one of the guys we were sent to rescue?”

“Yes. Shortly after he enlisted, his parents were notified that he’d been taken prisoner and was being held in the Hanoi Hilton. But then—”

“Price, come on. He enlisted in ’72. We were there in ’93. The Hanoi Hilton would have long been shut down by then.”

“I know. The POWs were released in February of ’73, but Randy wasn’t one of them. The Army could never confirm what happened. Escaped or dead, they said, and he was classified as MIA.”

“Death seems most likely, but even if he escaped, maybe he just didn’t come home. Maybe he wanted to start fresh somewhere else.”

“Randy wasn’t like that. He would have gotten in touch with somebody—me, most likely—but no one ever heard from him again. You’re probably right. Death makes the most sense. But negotiations with the North Vietnamese were touch and go, and if one of the POWs died right when they were getting released, things could have gotten ugly. Maybe they just got rid of the body. But I couldn’t live with myself without knowing. I’d already abandoned him once. I wasn’t going to abandon him again.”

Zeke was shaking his head. “It still doesn’t add up. You had no way of knowing that you’d eventually end up on such a far-fetched mission as Operation Lazarus. What was the thought process there?”

“I couldn’t let it go. I told myself that if I enlisted and made myself an expert on POWs and MIAs, I’d be able to get deeper into the records and maybe come up with something the Army had missed. I knew it was crazy, but I didn’t care. Logic didn’t have a whole lot to do with it. Because part of me knew I was also enlisting to prove to Randy that I wasn’t a coward. Funny how the mind works, isn’t it?”

He waited for a comment, but Zeke merely kept up his probing stare.

“Anyway,” he went on, “I was gung ho from day one. My goal was always to make it to Delta, because I knew that they were the ones to go on these kinds of missions if one ever came up. At the same time I made it my business to become an expert on POWs/MIAs. All that, combined with combat experience—I had been in Desert Storm—made me perfect for your team. The rest is history.”

“Very bad history. So after the Army, what? You got into studying killers?”

“I couldn’t just ignore what had happened, Zeke. I am human. I do have a conscience. I
knew
what I had done. I had murdered an innocent family. Nothing could change that, but…at least I could try to understand it. Maybe figure out some small way to atone for it. Not just to that family, but—” he looked toward the Wall again—“to those four guys who were left behind.” He looked at Zeke. “Because of me.”

Price was saying all the right things, striking just the right note of contrition. Zeke continued to study his face for signs that he was lying but couldn’t find any.

It didn’t really matter. None of this really mattered. He was too emotionally drained to care anymore about things that couldn’t be changed. All he felt was a gnawing emptiness. He started to take a sip from the coffee but left it sitting on the bench, sorry he’d accepted it in the first place.

Price’s expression had changed to the neutral mask of the professional psychologist. “You asked how I became an expert in this type of thing. I didn’t right away. I walked around like a zombie for a couple years, trying to make sense of it all. I had to make a living, so I used the electronic surveillance training I’d gotten in the Army to start my own business. But I still couldn’t get on the right side of things, Zeke. I was going to clubs a lot in New York, drowning my sorrows in the fast lane. I got to know some club owners, one thing led to another, and I starting doing jobs for some shady characters. Drug dealers eavesdropping on other drug dealers cutting in on their turf. Rich guys cheating on their trophy wives while trying to catch their wives cheating on them. I also did a lot of work for executives who had gotten busted, white collar crime. I became kind of a go-to guy in that circle. They’d hire me to try and catch the prosecutor or the cops who had arrested them doing something illegal, figuring that might get their case thrown out, or at least improve their chances of getting off. Instead of helping the cops catch the crooks, I was helping the crooks catch the cops. It was killing me inside, but I was caught up. I was making fabulous money. Evil pays better than good.”

“That’s a crock. You were trafficking in scum and you knew it. To go down that road after what you had done…how could you even live with yourself?”

“Finally I couldn’t. I shut down the business and decided it was time to get right. To face what I had done in Nam. To face myself. I decided to study cases like mine, see if I could learn anything that might help to keep them from happening. And in the process maybe find out why I did what I did.”

The grainy snow had turned into small flakes. A young couple went by, obviously in the grip of the profound sadness that emanated from the Wall. If they only knew that they’d just passed the two men responsible for one of the worst horrors that ever took place in Vietnam.

“I went back to college,” Price said. “Got a Ph.D. in what was then called Abnormal Psychology. That led to where I am now. Forensic Psychologist.”

“Interesting. I walked around like a zombie, too. Then I went back to college, like you did, looking for answers. Studied philosophy and theology, trying to see if the greatest thinkers, after thousands of years, had come up with any.”

“Did they?”

Zeke’s exhale came out as a fleeting cloud of smoke in the cold air. He gestured toward it as it dissipated.

“No. It was a lot of hot air, like that breath. Endless circular reasoning, debating each other’s premises, incessant back and forth about the types of human behavior, speculation, theories, belief systems—but never answers to the ultimate questions. Why are we here, and why is there evil?”

“No disrespect to the great thinkers, but I think I’ve gotten a lot closer to evil than they did. I spend a lot of my time interviewing death row inmates. Murderers convicted of the most heinous crimes. I’ve come to understand them all too well.”

“Fine, but then what? That’s what I’ve never understood. We study these pieces of human garbage and find out their parents were abusive alcoholics, on drugs, put cigarette butts out on their foreheads, or that girls didn’t like them. So what? We’ve learned enough to know why they do what they do. But knowing why doesn’t stop them. And it doesn’t bring back the dead.”

“Nothing brings back the dead, Zeke. Nobody knows that better than me.”

“So why, then? Who cares why this murderous piece of crap did what he did? All the studies in the world didn’t fix him—or stop any of the other sick bastards who start gunning people down.” He knew the last comment included Price but didn’t care.

“Believe it or not,” Price said, “it can be of some use. It can’t undo the past, but it can help the future. Profilers use this information to understand patterns of behavior that help them track down serial killers. It does save lives.”

“I know three lives it didn’t save. Nine if you count that family in Nam. Twenty-two if you count the other people this idiot killed in the restaurant.”

“I can’t argue that point with you.”

“Don’t.” To hear Price tell it, he’d been living his life to make up for that night. “So. You, of all people, are going to be interviewing the man who killed my family. God is an interesting fellow.”

“So is Satan. I’ve made quite a study of him.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve interviewed dozens of killers, Zeke. The worst of the worst. Invoking Satan as the trigger man is almost routine. You can’t keep hearing that without looking into Satanism, what we know of the Devil, and so forth. After a while it’s hard to discount it all as just ‘voices.’ Sometimes, their stories are hard to dismiss.”

“Are you saying that in some cases it
was
the Devil who made them do it?”

“I can’t say that with certainty. I have no concrete proof. It’s not really provable. You can’t exactly videotape the Prince of Darkness, goading them on. I can tell you that, with the worst of these killers, when I looked into their eyes, I knew I was looking into the very soul of evil.”

It struck Zeke that the dig he was considering would be the ultimate investigation into Price’s field of expertise. He debated asking his opinion on whether such a dig had merit. Maybe—although he doubted it—further conversation could help close the gaping hole Price had machine-gunned into his life.

Not now. It was cold and he’d had enough. Maybe later. “How long are you going to be in town?”

“However long it takes. Probably a week, at least.”

“Have you got a card in case I need to get in touch? Needless to say, I’ll be extremely interested in knowing how your interrogation turns out.”

Price took off his gloves and reached into a pocket of his overcoat. He opened a small black metal case with his monogram trimmed in gold and pulled out a card. Zeke took it and nodded at the case. “Fancy. Looks like you’re living large.”

“The job pays well.” He poked his heart. “But not here.”

“Good luck with that.” Zeke stood and shoved the card into his wallet. “You married?”

“No. You?”

“No. I couldn’t love anyone until I stopped hating myself.”

Price nodded. “I know the feeling.” He stood and faced Zeke. “And have you?”

“Have I what?”

“Stopped hating yourself.”

“Almost. What about you?”

“I’ve got a ways to go.”

The snow was turning into fat flakes that were covering the ground. Price slipped his gloves back on and looked Zeke in the eye.

“Feel free to call me any time, but as far as this case goes, don’t worry. I have your number and I’ll be keeping you posted every step of the way. Technically, what I find out would be confidential, but the heck with that noise. This is between you and me, and letting you know what this guy has to say is the absolute least I can do.”

Zeke merely stared at him.

“Listen, Zeke. I know you hate me. I don’t blame you. But I didn’t ask for this assignment.”

“You could have turned it down.”