Authors: Michael Prescott
Tags: #Kidnapping, #True Crime, #General, #Murder, #Suspense, #Fiction, #Serial Murderers
It was crazy, but Tess couldn’t get it out of her head.
Peter Faust. Ever since that phone call yesterday evening, she’d been reliving her interview with him from three years ago. This was all Abby’s fault, of course. It was never good news when that woman called.
Last night she’d lain awake trying to reconstruct the interview, trying to remember every detail of Faust’s body language and facial expressions, trying to put herself back in the moment. She didn’t know why it was important. She only knew she had to remember.
Her obsession had not gone away in daylight. Even though she was scheduled to fly back to Denver this evening, she was almost tempted to have a copy of the interview transcript faxed or e-mailed to her. Then she realized there was an easier solution. The Behavioral Analysis Unit was located close to the Quantico base. They would have the interview on file.
She dropped by on her lunch break, parking her rental car at the North Stafford office building that housed
CIRG
, the Critical Incident Response Group—more than three hundred operatives whose purview included operations support, tactical support, crime analysis, and criminal profiling. The latter was where
BAU
came in.
The unit had gone through several name changes. It was best-known as the Behavioral Science Section, but it had been the Behavioral Analysis Unit for some time. The art of profiling was now known as criminal investigative analysis. The semantic changes were perhaps a tacit recognition that profiling was less a science than an art. More likely, they were just a reflection of the FBI’s bottomless appetite for new terminology.
After September 11, the profilers had been split into three units handling counterterrorism, crimes against children, and crimes against adults, with a fourth unit running the old
VICAP
program. In addition, the FBI’s Training Division maintained its own profiling section for educational purposes—a section known, confusingly enough, as the Behavioral Science Unit, the very name that had started it all.
Profiling had generated a lot of publicity, but Tess remained skeptical. She had seen too many cases where some perfectly innocent civilian was subjected to law enforcement harassment because he happened to meet somebody’s idea of how the suspect ought to behave. Profiling was a matter of playing the percentages. Most serial offenders could be divided into fairly distinct categories and ascribed reasonably predictable behaviors. But not all of them. Some stood outside any established category or managed to confound the analysts by combining qualities that were supposed to be mutually exclusive.
Novelists and filmmakers jazzed up the work of FBI profilers considerably. Real life was less dramatic. The profilers weren’t Sherlock Holmes. They were more like Mycroft Holmes, the great detective’s smarter brother, who rarely left the comfort of his armchair. The
BAU
analysts worked at their desks. Law-enforcement agencies requesting their help had to fill out tedious questionnaires. The answers were then entered into the profilers’ computers. Most of the analysis was done automatically by matching up these answers with standard profiles. Agents reviewed the work to ensure accuracy and add personal touches.
They almost never went to a crime scene, never attended autopsies, did not interview persons of interest in the case. Most of them probably neglected to carry their firearms, and it was doubtful that any of them, at least in their capacity as behavioral analysts, had ever used one. If there was a less glamorous job in the Bureau, Tess didn’t know about it.
Even their offices lacked allure. Drab and utilitarian, they had all the ambience of a third-rate accounting firm. There could at least have been some paintings on the walls, but evidently art wasn’t in the budget.
Tess identified herself to the duty agent and requested a transcript of the interview, giving the date and other particulars.
“I can do better than a transcript,” he said after checking the files. “We’ve got that one on DVD. Would that be preferable?”
She almost said no, then remembered that her laptop had a DVD drive. She waited while he disappeared into another room to burn the disk.
It would be strange to see the interview on video—to watch herself in dialogue with Faust. She wondered if his personality would come across on her laptop screen—no, not his personality, but his essence, the dark heart of his being, which she had glimpsed. The evil inside him.
Evil. There was a word that wasn’t spoken very often in these offices. Behavioral analysis was all about patterns of activity, family history, psychological triggers, psychosexual needs. In these surroundings it would be a serious faux pas to bring up any moral considerations. Which was not to say that the good people at the Behavioral Analysis Unit weren’t concerned with matters of right and wrong. But they had learned to compartmentalize. Right and wrong, good and evil—these were things that might occupy their minds while raising their children or sitting in church, but not at their desks.
It was funny, in a way. The same people who so assiduously divided their subjects into categories, who routinely distinguished between the organized and the disorganized offender or between the antisocial and the asocial personality type, could not bring themselves to make the simplest distinction of all, one that any child could make—the distinction between good and bad.
Tess had no such qualms. She believed in evil. Maybe it was her Catholic upbringing, or maybe it was the way she had lost Paul to Mobius’s knife.
Or maybe her belief stemmed from a night early in her career, when she was stationed in Miami. She’d just gone off duty when a Hispanic agent who’d grown up locally invited her to witness an exorcism. It was the kind of opportunity she couldn’t pass up.
The exorcism took place in the Little Havana apartment of a Santeria priest, a
babalawo
. The tiny one-bedroom unit was crammed with icons of the saints and makeshift altars, and suffused with smoke from a
sahumerio
, ritual incense. Candles burned everywhere, all of them white—the sacred color, she was told, of the god who would be invoked tonight.
In the bedroom she found the
babalawo
and his patient, a nine-year-old boy whose parents were convinced he was possessed by evil spirits. The boy lay quivering and twitching on the bed, his eyes rolling madly. The smell of the incense was strongest here, and the candles seemed to burn with extra brightness.
The ceremony began with an invocation of the king of the spirits. All-powerful, he must be mentioned for safety’s sake. But the real focus of the ritual was the lesser god who could expel evil spirits from their unwilling host.
A basin of water lay on the floor. The exorcised spirits would be driven into the water and thereby cleansed.
When the second god was summoned, the boy began to shake violently. The
babalawo
called on the god for deliverance. The boy writhed on the
bedsheets
. Sweat popped out on his face. Shouts and moans issued from his mouth. His lips were stretched wide, his teeth bared.
There was a squawking hen in a cage by the bed. The
babalawo
pulled it out and cut its throat, then dribbled its blood over a heap of stones sacred to the god. His voice rose, becoming a wild, keening wail.
And then something happened, or seemed to happen, something that Tess could not explain. Suddenly it was as if the boy were sinking into the bed—sinking
through
the bed. As if he were being dragged down through the physical reality of the bed itself, into some lower dimension.
It had to have been an optical illusion, or a hallucination brought on by the eye-watering smoke and the
babalawo
’s
chants. But she could swear she saw it.
And she was equally sure she saw a dark, miasmic cloud rise from the boy and hover in the candlelit room, a fog blacker than the
sahumerio
smoke. It lingered for a moment, then vanished into the basin.
On the bed, the boy lay quiet, his breathing normal, his flushed face quickly resuming its natural color. After a minute or two he awoke from his trance. He seemed composed and happy. His parents thanked the
babalawo
effusively.
Tess left the apartment, shaken. She wasn’t sure what she had witnessed. But of one thing she was certain: In the instant before the black miasma had disappeared into the water, she had felt a
presence
in the bedroom. A presence of pure malice, of unadulterated evil. In a rush the sermons she’d endured at Catholic services had come back to her—Satan the evil one, devils and the outer darkness, the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It had been a long time since she’d taken such stories literally. Yet in the bedroom, in that moment, they had felt real. Not metaphors, not myths. Real.
It would have been easy to forget what she’d seen and felt, chalk it up to an overactive imagination or the power of suggestion. She was not naive enough to be so skeptical. She could no more forget what she had perceived than she could doubt the reality of her own body.
Something
had taken control of that boy and had been forced out.
Something
had been overmastered and tamed in that barrio bedroom.
There was evil in the world, and it was real and tangible.
She hadn’t thought of the Santeria exorcism very often over the years, but she did think of it when she met Peter Faust. Because if there was an immutable evil that moved through this earth like a silent plague, then Peter Faust was its host. And unlike the boy in Little Havana, Faust was a willing host. He had spread out a welcome mat for evil and embraced it with open arms.
The duty agent interrupted her thoughts. He had finished making the copy.
“Here’s the disk. It contains the complete interview, plus a little bonus at the end—the LAPD video of their search of Faust’s home. They gave us a copy for our files.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I appreciate it.”
“I thought you might want to see where he lives. You know,” he added almost shyly, “you have a lot of fans here. Agent McCallum.”
“Do I?” Now she felt guilty about having criticized the
BAU
, even if only in her thoughts. “Well, thank you. I need all the support I can get.”
She took the disk from him. It felt oddly warm in her hand, as if it held some concentrated heat, like the fires of hell. As if it were not a video disk but a lump of brimstone.
Crazy. Faust wasn’t the devil, no matter what the demonic connotations of his name. He was a man; that was all.
Only a man.
Faust spent the night with Elise, departing in midmorning to drive home. As always, he took a certain sensual pleasure in operating his BMW sedan. The hum of the engine was a throaty, leonine growl, the sound of a hungry animal. And he relished the feel of the leather upholstery, soft and yielding. Leather had very positive associations for him. Caressing the seat cushions, he remembered the strap as it tightened around Emily Wallace’s neck.
As he neared his house, he was pleasantly tingling with what Americans called a buzz. In his case it was not a buzz of alcohol, narcotics, or even caffeine—he did not indulge in the first two at all, and never overindulged in the third. It was merely a slight thrill of anticipation, similar perhaps to what small children felt on Christmas morning as they prepared to see what gifts Santa had left.
He had never known that particular thrill. He had never believed in Santa. Nor had he believed in God. The devil, however, was another matter. He had always been sure the devil was real.
He wondered if Elise believed in evil. No doubt she would swear she did not. She was too sophisticated for such empty moralism. But could he trust her? She was as innocent of her own innermost depths and subconscious motives as any child.
Faust had often told Elise that Americans were naive and easily fooled. Yet it never seemed to occur to her that she herself was an American.
She saw herself as cosmopolitan and worldly-wise. She was in the fashion industry, was she not? She traveled the globe, hobnobbed with intellectuals, and pretended to understand their chatter. She disdained ethics, mocked religion. She even spoke a smattering of French.
With these accomplishments to her credit, she thought she had earned entry into the elite. She could feel superior to all the unenlightened ones, the hoi polloi with their potbellies and bumper stickers and hometown sports teams. She was not among them, or so she thought.
She was wrong. She might have forgotten her origins, but Faust had not. She had been raised in a suburb of Detroit by parents who ran a sandwich shop. Imagine that—
a sandwich shop
. They sold hoagies or heroes or subs, whatever those repellent foot-long sandwiches were called in that part of the country. They took vacations to Disneyland and Sea World. They watched situation comedies while eating dinner on plastic trays.
She might be a world traveler now, but she could never escape her beginnings.
And so he could not trust her, not fully. There was no way to ensure that she would not revert to the girl she had been, whose mommy and daddy had taught her so earnestly about right and wrong.
No way to be certain that she would not betray him.
She
might
rise to the challenge. Or she might not. He could not take the risk. And so there were things he had not told her.
Raven, for instance.
Elise knew nothing about her.
He reached his house and pulled into the curving driveway, leaving the BMW parked by the front door.
His home stood on a half acre, a spacious lot by local standards. It was high enough in the Los
Feliz
foothills to command what the real estate agent had described as “jetliner views”—the sweep of the city from the downtown to the sea, framed in steel casement windows and French doors. The estate was surrounded by high walls topped with metal spikes; entry was afforded by a wrought-iron gate, operated by a key card.
The house, in southern California’s trademark Mediterranean style, had been built in 1926 by an insanely imaginative architect. It had seven bedrooms, five full baths and two half baths, a vast kitchen, a step-down living room under a barreled ceiling, a study, a media room, and a covered veranda featuring one of the home’s four fireplaces. And a maid’s room, de rigueur in the twenties. But Faust had no live-in help. He enjoyed privacy.
The maid’s room was on the ground floor near the back door. It was windowless and small.
Six years ago, when Faust purchased the house, he made alterations to the room. The work was done quietly and without the inconvenience of government permits or union contractors. He stripped the faded wallpaper and had the room soundproofed. He had the flimsy door replaced with one of solid oak. He tore out the carpet, exposing the hardwood floor.
To carry out his final alterations, he hired day laborers who spoke little English and had no idea who he was. At his instruction they built a new paneled wall in front of the door to the room. The wall had a hinged section that could be swung forward to permit access to the door behind it. When the hinged section was closed, it blended seamlessly with the rest of the wall.
The maid’s room had effectively ceased to exist. No visitor to his home—or almost none—ever imagined that there was a room behind the paneled wall. Although Elise had spent many nights in the house, had roamed it freely, even she did not know.
But Raven knew.
Faust had kept Raven in the hidden, soundproofed room for ten days now, subsisting on soda crackers and bottled water. He was most impressed with her. She had held out so bravely during her captivity.
But all her courage would not save her from the same fate as the others. The many others whose lives he had taken, all the pretty young things killed by his hands.
I am not a serial killer
, he had told Abby Sinclair.
I killed just once
.
He had delivered the same lie to Elise. She believed him. Sinclair had been skeptical. Yet in the end she had taken the job anyway. For Elise’s sake. To protect the innocent. That was the sales pitch, and it had worked. He had turned her own morality against her.
Now Sinclair was working as his agent, while convinced she was on the side of good. He wondered what Raven would think of that.
Faust almost asked her, after he unlocked the door and entered the room and untied the linen gag from around her head. But he forgot. He was struck again by her beautiful innocence, her absolute helplessness.
She lay before him, naked, bruised, manacled to the headboard, coughing weakly after biting down on the gag for many hours. He never left her
unmuzzled
. Although the room was soundproofed, he took no chances. For the same reason he had positioned the bed well away from the walls, so she could not stamp her feet and create reverberations that would travel through the house.
Her hair was long and black, and might be silky when clean. He wouldn’t know. She had been dirty when he met her, one of countless urchins living in the streets or in condemned buildings, turning tricks for a little pocket money. She was a runaway from somewhere. The appellation Raven was only a nickname, presumably a tribute to her jet-black hair; he had no notion of what her real name might be. She would doubtless tell him, but he had never thought to ask.
Although she had been dirty enough on their first encounter, she was positively filthy now. The sealed, airless room was hot, and she was scared, a combination that had left her ripe with body odor. He did not mind. He liked the smell of unadorned human flesh. Americans masked their scent with perfumes, colognes, and deodorants. He preferred nature’s uncomplicated musk.
Although he was indifferent to her true name, he had inquired after her age. She was fifteen, she had said. That was good. He still liked them young.
She had concluded her coughing fit. He unscrewed a bottle of mineral water and tipped it to her mouth. It was a gesture not of kindness but of necessity. Deprived of water she would expire of thirst, and he did not want her to die that way.
She swallowed half the bottle, choking on it at the end. He pulled it free and wiped her chin.
With rheumy eyes she peered up at him. She asked the question she always asked.
“Why?” Her voice was a sad, toneless croak.
She had asked him this question many times over the past ten days, sometimes tearfully, sometimes angrily, and sometimes—as she did now—in exhausted futility. Always he gave her the same answer, the only answer there was, but one she did not want to hear.
“There is no why,” he said. “There is no reason for anything, ever. You distract yourself in seeking what cannot be found.”
She only stared at him. The words had not reached her. They never did. She was a creature of her ethos, her mythos. She believed in reasons, in purpose. She could not accept, could not grasp, the ultimate pointlessness of it all.
After a long moment she asked a new question, one she had not voiced before.
“When?”
In the deflated pessimism of her tone, he caught her meaning. When would it be over? When would
she
be over?
“Soon,” he said, almost kindly. He could afford to be kind to one who was utterly under his power.
He never could predict his exact timetable. There came a point, invariably, when the victim ceased to interest him. When the last glimmer of life and hope had drained away, and there was only a shell, staring and mindless. He took no enjoyment in maintaining the victim’s life after that. Once she had been thoroughly broken, reduced to something less than human—then it was time to put her down.
He thought of it as a mercy killing. The termination of a life no longer worth living.
Raven was nearly at that point. He had charted her descent with scientific exactitude. In the beginning, she had tried to kick him whenever he approached; her legs were not chained. When ungagged, she had screamed for help, the cries echoing through the empty house.
He had not punished her for these actions. They were a natural response, a manifestation of the will to survive. She was no better than an animal, after all, and like an animal she acted on instinct.
Now she neither fought back nor called out. She was spent. Or nearly spent. But not quite there. A day longer, perhaps two, and she would be done. When the last faint spark faded from her eyes.
“Soon,” he said again, brushing her matted hair. “Soon now.”
He was so very pleased with her.