Darkness, Take My Hand (21 page)

“Who were the women?” I said. “Bubba?”

“Emma Hurlihy and Diedre Rider. You believe that? A couple of chicks kicking my ass. Crazy world. Huh?”

“Gotta go, Bubba. Call you soon. Okay?”

I hung up and dialed Bolton.

“What did these
people do?” Angie said.

We were standing over her coffee table with Bolton, Devin, Oscar, Erdham, and Fields, all of us staring down at copies of a photo Fields had acquired by waking the editor of
The Dorchester Community Sun
, a local weekly that had been covering the neighborhoods since 1962.

The photo was from a puff piece done on neighborhood watch groups the week of June 12, 1974. Under the headline
NEIGHBORS WHO CARE
, the article gushed about the daring exploits of the EEPA, as well as the Adams Corner Neighborhood Watch in Neponset, the Savin Hill Community League, the Field’s Corner Citizens Against Crime, and the Ashmont Civic Pride Protectors.

My father was quoted in the third column: “I’m a fireman, and one thing firemen know is that you have to stop a fire in the low floors, before it gets out of control.”

“Your old man had a feel for the sound bite,” Oscar said. “Even back then.”

“It was one of his favorite sayings. He’d had years of practice with it.”

Fields had blown up the photo of the EEPA members and there they stood on the basketball court of the Ryan Playground, trying to look mean and friendly at the same time.

My father and Jack Rouse were kneeling at the center of the group, on either side of an EEPA sign with shamrocks in the upper corners. They both looked like they were posing for football cards, as if emulating the stance
of defensive linemen, fists dug into the ground, opposite hands holding up the sign.

Behind them stood a very young Stan Timpson, the only person wearing a tie, followed from left to right by Diedre Rider, Emma Hurlihy, Paul Burns, and Terry Climstich.

“What’s this?” I said and pointed at a tiny bar of black to the right of the photo.

“The photographer’s name,” Fields said.

“Can we magnify it somehow, get a look at it?”

“I’m ahead of you, Mr. Kenzie.”

We turned and looked at him.

“Diandra Warren took that photograph.”

She looked like death.

Her skin was the color of white formica and the clothes hanging to her skeletal frame were beseiged by wrinkles.

“Tell me about the Edward Everett Protection Association, Diandra. Please,” I said.

“The what?” She stared at me with bleary eyes. As she stood before me, I felt I was looking at someone I’d known in youth but hadn’t seen in several decades, only to discover that time had not only worn her down, but had laid waste to her without mercy.

I placed the photograph on the bar in front of her.

“Your husband, my father, Jack Rouse, Emma Hurlihy, Diedre Rider.”

“That was fifteen or twenty years ago,” she said.

“Twenty,” Bolton said.

“Why didn’t you recognize my name?” I said. “You knew my father.”

She cocked her head, looked at me as if I’d just claimed she was a long-lost sister.

“I never knew your father, Mr. Kenzie.”

I pointed at the photo. “There he is, Doctor Warren. Standing a foot away from your husband.”

“That’s your father?” She stared at the photo.

“Yes. And that’s Jack Rouse beside him. And just over his left shoulder, that’s Kevin Hurlihy’s mother.”

“I didn’t…” She peered at the faces. “I didn’t know these people by name, Mr. Kenzie. I took this photo be
cause Stan asked me to. This silly group was something he was involved with, not me. I wouldn’t even allow them to have meetings at our house.”

“Why not?” Devin said.

She sighed and waved a frail hand. “All that macho posturing under the guise of community service. It was so ridiculous. Stan would try to convince me how good it would look on his résumé, but he was no different than the rest, forming a street gang and calling it socially benevolent.”

Bolton said, “Our records indicate that you filed for separation from Mr. Timpson in November of nineteen seventy-four. Why?”

She shrugged and yawned into her fist.

“Doctor Warren?”

“Jesus Christ,” she said sharply. “Jesus Christ.” She looked up at us and for a moment life returned to her, and then just as suddenly dissipated. She dropped her head into her hands and limp strands of hair fell over her fingers.

“Stanley,” she said, “showed his true colors that summer. He was a Roman basically, convinced of his own moral superiority. He’d come home with blood on his shoe from kicking some unlucky car thief and try to tell me it was about justice. He became ugly…sexually, as if I were no longer his wife but his purchased courtesan. He changed from an essentially decent man with some unanswered questions about his manhood into a storm trooper.” She stabbed her finger into the photo. “And it was this group that caused it. This ridiculous, silly group of fools.”

“Was there any one particular incident that you can recall, Doctor Warren?”

“In what way?”

“Did he ever tell you war stories?” Devin said.

“No. Not after we fought about the blood on his shoe that time.”

“And you’re sure it was a car thief’s blood?”

She nodded.

“Doctor Warren,” I said and she looked up at me, “if
you were estranged from Timpson, why did you help the DA’s office during the Hardiman trial?”

“Stan had nothing to do with the case. He was prosecuting prostitutes in night court back then. I had helped the DA’s office once before when a defendant was claiming insanity, and they liked the result, so they asked me to interview Alec Hardiman. I found him to be sociopathic, given to delusions of grandeur, and paranoid, but legally sane, fully aware of the diffeRenee between right and wrong.”

“Was there any connection between EEPA and Alec Hardiman?” Oscar said.

She shook her head. “None that I ever knew of.”

“Why did EEPA disband?”

She shrugged. “I think they just got bored. I really don’t know. I’d moved out of the neighborhood by then. Stan followed a few months later.”

“There’s nothing else you can remember from that time?”

She stared at the photograph for a long time.

“I remember,” she said wearily, “that when I took this picture I was pregnant, and I was feeling nauseous that day. I told myself it was the heat and the baby growing inside me. But it wasn’t. It was them.” She pushed the photo away. “There was a sickness to that group, a corruption. I had the feeling, as I took this picture, that they’d hurt someone very badly some day. And like it.”

In the RV, Fields removed his headphones and looked at Bolton. “The prison shrink, Doctor Dolquist, has been trying to reach Mr. Kenzie. I can patch him through.”

Bolton nodded, turned to me. “Put it on speaker.”

I answered the phone on the first ring.

“Mr. Kenzie? Ron Dolquist.”

“Doctor Dolquist,” I said, “may I put you on speaker phone?”

“Certainly.”

I did, and his voice picked up a metallic quality, as if it were bouncing off several satellites at once.

“Mr. Kenzie, I’ve spent a lot of time going over all the
notes I’ve kept of my sessions with Alec Hardiman over the years, and I think I may have stumbled on something. Warden Lief tells me you believe Evandro Arujo is working on the outside at Hardiman’s behest?”

“That’s correct.”

“Have you considered the possibility that Evandro has a partner?”

There were eight of us packed in the RV, and we all looked at the speaker simultaneously.

“Why would you say that, Doctor?”

“Well, it was something I’d forgotten about, but the first few years he was here, Alec spent a lot of time talking about someone named John.”

“John?”

“Yes. At the time, Alec was working hard to have his conviction overturned on the grounds of insanity, and he pulled out all the stops to convince the psychiatric staff that he was delusional, paranoid, schizophrenic, you name it. This John, I believed, was just his attempt to establish multiple personality syndrome. After nineteen seventy-nine, he never mentioned him again.”

Bolton leaned over my shoulder. “What changed your mind, Doctor?”

“Agent Bolton? Oh. Well, at the time I did allow for the possibility that John was a manifestation of his own personality—a fantasy Alec, if you will, who could walk through walls, disappear in mist, that sort of thing. But as I went through my notes last night, I kept coming upon refeRenees to a trinity, and I recalled that he’d told you, Mr. Kenzie, that you’d be transformed into a ‘man of impact’ by—”

“The ‘Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,’” I said.

“Yes. Often, when Alec spoke of this John, he called him Father John. Alec would be the son. And the ghost—”

“Arujo,” I said. “He vanishes into mist.”

“Exactly. Alec’s grasp of the true meaning of the Blessed Trinity leaves a lot to be desired, but it’s like a lot of mythological and religious imagery with him—he takes what he needs and molds it to suit his purposes, tosses out the rest.”

“Tell us more about John, Doctor.”

“Yes, yes. John, according to Alec, disguises himself as his polar opposite. Only with his victims and his closest intimates—Hardiman, Rugglestone, and now Arujo—does he remove the mask, lets them see the ‘pure fury of his true face,’ as Alec put it. When you look at John, you see what
you want to see
in a person; you see benevolence and wisdom and gentleness. But John is none of these things. According to Alec, John is a ‘scientist’ who studies human suffering first hand for clues to the motives behind creation.”

“The motives behind creation?” I said.

“I’m going to read to you from notes I took during a session with Alec in September of seventy-eight, shortly before he stopped mentioning John entirely. These are Alec Hardiman’s words:

“’If God is benevolent, then why do we have such a capacity to feel pain? Our nerves are supposed to alert us to dangers; that’s the biological reason for pain. Yet we can feel pain far past the level necessary to alert us to danger. We can feel acute levels of pain beyond description. And not only do we have
this
capacity, as all animals do, but we further have the mental capacity to suffer it again and again emotionally and psychically. No other animal shares that capacity. Does God hate us that much? Or does He love us that much? And if neither, if it’s just an arbitrary flaw in our DNA, then isn’t the point of all this pain He’s given us to inure us? Make us as indifferent to the suffering of others as He is? And so shouldn’t we emulate Him, do as John does—revel in and prolong and improve upon pain and our methods of inflicting it? John understands that this is the essence of purity.’”

Dolquist cleared his throat. “End quote.”

Bolton said, “Doctor?”

“Yes?”

“Right off the top of your head, describe John.”

“He’s physically powerful, and if you met him, you’d be able to see that, but it wouldn’t be overt. He’s not a bodybuilder, you understand, just a strong man. He appears to others to be quite sane and rational, maybe even
wise. I would expect that he’s beloved in his community, a doer of good deeds on a small level.”

“Is he married?” Bolton said.

“I doubt it. Even he’d have to know that no matter how good his facade, his spouse and his children would sense his disease. He may have been married once, but not anymore.”

“What else?”

“I don’t think he’s been able to stop killing for the past two decades. It would be impossible for him. I believe he chose only to keep his kills quiet.”

We all looked at Angie and she tipped an imaginary hat.

“What else, Doctor?”

“The primary thrill for him is the kills. But secondary to that, and only barely, is the joy he gets living behind his mask. John stares out at you from behind that mask and laughs at you from behind the cover it provides. It’s very sexual to him, and that’s why he has to finally take it off after all these years.”

“I’m not following you,” I said.

“Think of it as a prolonged erection, if you will. John has been waiting to climax for over twenty years now. As much as he enjoys that erection, his need to ejaculate is even more pressing.”

“He wants to be caught.”

“He wants to
expose
himself. It’s not the same thing. He wants to take off the mask and spit in your face as you’re looking into his
real
eyes, but that’s not to say he’ll accept handcuffs willingly.”

“Anything else, Doctor?”

“Yes. I think he knows Mr. Kenzie. I don’t mean
knows of
him. I mean, he’s known him for a long time. They’ve met. Face to face.”

“Why do you say that?” I said.

“A man like this establishes odd relationships, but no matter how odd, they’re extremely important to him. It would be paramount to him that he know one of his pursuers. For whatever reason, he chose you, Mr. Kenzie. And he let you know by having Hardiman send for you. You
and John know each other, Mr. Kenzie. I’d stake my reputation on it.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Bolton said. “I’m assuming the reason you read from your notes is because you have no intention of releasing them to us.”

“Not without a court order,” Dolquist said, “and even then you’d be in for a battle. If I find anything else in there which I think can stop these murders, I’ll call immediately. Mr. Kenzie?”

“Yes?”

“If I could have a word with you alone?”

Bolton shrugged and I shut off the speaker, cradled the phone to my ear. “Yes, Doctor?”

“Alec was wrong.”

“About?”

“About my wife. He was wrong.”

“That’s good to hear,” I said.

“I just wanted that…to be clear. He was wrong,” Dolquist repeated. “Good-bye, Mr. Kenzie.”

“Good-bye, Doctor.”

“Stan Timpson is in Cancun,” Erdham said.

“What?” Bolton said.

“It’s correct, sir. Took the wife and kids down there three days ago for a little R and R.”

“A little R and R,” Bolton said. “He’s the district attorney of Suffolk County during a serial-killer crisis. And he goes to Mexico?” He shook his head. “Go get him.”

“Sir? I’m not a field agent.”

Bolton pointed his finger at him. “Send someone, then. Send two agents, and bring him back.”

“Under arrest, sir?”

“For questioning. Where’s he staying?”