“You know what I think? We’re part of the problem,” her father told Crosse one night.
“How so?” he asked.
“Supporting her, for one thing. Making it easy for her to be sick while she lives here. It’s time for some tough love. We’ve got two younger kids to think about. It’s affecting them. They worry about her constantly, can’t concentrate on school or work. They half-hate her, half-love her. She’s tearing everyone apart.”
Crosse was all for banishing her. When you have a malignancy, you remove it, as early as possible. Otherwise, it devours everything around it.
The paradigm held for a cancerous cell in the body, a cancerous person in a family, or a cancerous nation on the face of the earth.
He was already sleeping with Chase, already knew how damaged she was. He suspected her father might be the cause, that Scout Van Myer might have had sex with his daughter when she was a child. But her history
didn’t matter anymore. Because he had no hope for her. The rest of the family was prospering.
She
was the problem now. “I think getting her her own place makes sense,” he told her father. “If she has to keep up an apartment, support herself, she might snap out of it.”
And so it was decided in the last weeks of the design phase of the Van Myer mansion that Chase’s bedroom, still decorated with pink walls and stuffed animals and trophies from summer camp, would become a library and billiards room. No trace would be left of her. She would be relocated to a one-bedroom apartment several blocks away, given six months” rent and her parents” best wishes.
That was the plan. But shortly after her room was gutted, Chase spiraled out of control, overdosed, and was arrested for prostitution. She overdosed again, sliced up her arms, and landed in intensive care.
“We have to take her back,” her father told Crosse.
“You’re being tested,” Crosse told him.
“And if she dies? How am I supposed to live with that?”
“By knowing you tried to save her.”
“There are things that happened to her... as a child,” Van Myer said.
“She isn’t a child anymore,” Crosse said flatly.
But the Van Myers” will was broken. Whatever demons terrorized Chase now had them terrorized, too. They let her retreat back into their home, emptied the library of books and filled it again with her childhood memories and bed and increasingly ragef ul art—a clay sculpture of a woman’s head with nails for teeth, another
of four babies broken into pieces, a painting of a young girl nailed to a cross.
They let the devil into the sacred space Crosse had created, violating God’s great design. And the malignancy spread. Life turned out no better for Chase, and far worse for the rest of the family.
The Van Myers began to fight constantly. Their other children began competing with Chase for attention. Her sister Gabriela landed in the emergency room twice, with cocaine overdoses. The youngest sibling, a sixteen-year-old boy, dropped out of school.
Over the last month, Scout Van Myer had called Crosse, his Bones brother, panicked, watching his life unravel, unable to see any way out of the maze he had helped to build.
Now, there was only one way out.
Crosse walked over to the bed. He picked up one of the lengths of gold silk rope.
Chase smiled.
He fastened her right wrist securely to the bedpost.
She stretched her left hand toward the opposite bedpost.
He fastened her left wrist, then her left ankle, then her right. “Try to get out,” he told her, with no emotion. He was a surgeon now. A soldier for the Lord. He felt no excitement, no sorrow, no fear, no pity.
She pulled hard against her tethers, flexing her arms and legs the little she could.
“Good,” he said. “Lie still.”
She obeyed.
He unbuttoned his shirt, took it off, unfastened his belt, removed his pants, then his underwear.
She stared at him wide-eyed.
He walked to the bedside table, opened the drawer, and removed a white silk scarf. He folded it into a blindfold.
She lifted her head off the pillow.
He tied the blindfold around her head. “Can you see?” he asked her.
“No.”
He reached back into the drawer, took out a bottle of chloroform and another white scarf. He poured the liquid over the cloth, then held it over her nose and mouth.
She struggled only weakly before falling asleep.
Crosse was certain he knew why she didn’t fight harder: Chase Van Myer understood better than anyone that her life was bringing her and her family more pain than pleasure. And she knew there was no end in sight. Why else would she try to commit suicide again and again?
He reached into the drawer, removed a tourniquet and a syringe filled with the paralytic agent succinyl-choline. He tied the tourniquet around Chase’s arm, and injected one milligram. Within fifteen seconds he saw Chase’s arms and legs, then her face and neck, begin to twitch with disorganized contractions as the suc-cinylcholine relentlessly stimulated each and every one of her muscles. He knew that even her heart and diaphragm were tightening in on themselves over and over again, unable to stop squeezing. Her body had itself in a death grip and would not let go.
Crosse was not moved. He was certain that what he was doing was in service to liberty, and that freed him
to do whatever was necessary with a firm hand and a clear conscience.
Within one minute, Chase’s muscles were so fatigued, her system so poisoned with the metabolic waste products of physical exertion, that she lay completely still, paralyzed. Her heart might occasionally shudder, but would no longer pump any blood. Her lungs would move no air. Her respiratory and circulatory systems had collapsed. She was suffocating in silence.
Crosse untied her arms and legs, removed her blindfold, and pulled the bedspread out from under her, leaving her naked on a plastic sheet he had placed there before she arrived. He unfolded the sides of the sheet so that it covered the entire bed and several feet of the carpet on either side of it.
He rolled his vintage Louis Vuitton steamer trunk to the bedside, pulled open one of its drawers, revealing a scalpel, surgical saw, retractors, and surgical clamps.
From another drawer he took a perfectly pressed white linen tunic and pulled it on. He knelt beside the bed, closed his eyes, and prayed:
Lord God, King of the Universe
May you steady my mind and heart and hand
.
Your resolve is mine
,
As I liberate this family from evil
.
I once was lost, but now am found
.
Was blind, but now, I see
.
He stood up. He watched and listened to make absolutely certain Chase was not breathing. He checked her wrist to make sure she had no pulse. He did not
want to cause suffering in the world. He wanted to end suffering.
She was gone.
All that remained for him was to leave a symbol of his love of beauty and truth. He knew it would be one of his last chances to do so.
He pushed Chase’s legs together, spread her arms out to the sides, replicating Leonardo da Vinci’s famous illustration of the divine proportions of the human body.
He turned up the volume on the stereo, allowed the grace of
The Messiah
to fill him.
He picked up the scalpel.
Behind the eyelids, deep to the bony orbits and orbital septum, lay a world of perfect structure and function. Bands of rectus, levator, and oblique muscles, enervated by three separate cranial nerves, embraced the eyeball, allowing the brain miraculous control over eye movement. The ophthalmic artery branched a dozen times, a tree of life feeding not only the eye muscles, but retina, lacrimal gland, iris, and cornea.
Crosse’s first incision bisected Chase’s right upper lid. He took two handmade sterling silver nails out of the steamer trunk and pinned back each flap, revealing the delicate axons of the supraorbital nerve. Waves of excitement began to course through him. He thought to himself how little other people were willing to see, how terrified they were to look toward the light, to imagine where freedom might take them and then summon the courage and faith to get there.
He worked more than three hours, placing his last sterling silver nail through Chase’s right optic nerve at 3:05 A.M.
He stood back in awe, not of the work he had done, but the perfection he had exposed. In this, as in everything, he was no more than God’s messenger.
He made deep, curved incisions under Chase’s hips, slicing into the muscles and fascia connecting her legs and pelvis. He wrapped the plastic sheet around her, emptied the steamer trunk of its drawers, and placed her inside, with her knees tucked tight against her chin.
He called the parking attendant and told him to have his black Range Rover waiting, cargo door open. He took the elevator down to the lobby, calmly checked out of the hotel, and then strolled toward the front doors, pulling the steamer trunk behind him. As he walked, he reveled in the travertine marble walls, the rare Irish wool carpeting under his feet. But he was moved especially, as he always was, by the Rigal mural overhead, composed of twenty-one individual paintings, each a tribute to Greek mythology. He felt completely at peace, reassured that great art endures and that his greatest work was almost at hand.
EIGHTEEN
AUGUST 13, 2OO5, 11:50 A.M., CENTRAL TIME
Clevenger had gotten a
call from Whitney McCormick just before 7:00 A.M. and had managed to grab an 8:35 A.M. flight from Boston to Chicago.
He stood with her in front of Chase Van Myer’s naked body, sitting upright, wrists bound to the armrests of the center seat in the front row of the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, a billowing, stainless steel band shell designed by Frank Gehry, the centerpiece of Chicago’s $475 million Millennium Park. Her eye sockets had been meticulously dissected, revealing the muscles, nerves, and blood vessels that once controlled and nourished her eyes. The result was a grotesque audience of one, staring up at the 120-foot-high edifice, as though the sight of it had been enough to peel back her flesh.
Despite a makeshift tent of tarps placed around the body, word had leaked out that Scout Van Myer’s daughter lay behind it. Dozens of onlookers, including television and newspaper reporters, were being
kept away by a wall of police officers, cruisers, and ambulances.
A CSI team was combing the area, snapping photos, dusting for fingerprints, casting footprints.
Clevenger motioned toward the word “FUCKED” on Van Myer’s thigh. “Looks pretty new.”
“Yeah. But most of the scars on her arms aren’t. Neither are most of the needle marks.”
“Troubled kid.”
“Black sheep of the family. She’s been arrested for prostitution, shoplifting, drug possession, drunk and disorderly conduct.”
“Have her parents been notified?” Clevenger asked McCormick.
“They’re on their way.”
Clevenger and McCormick both knew they could never comprehend the horror of a mother or father looking upon a daughter’s mutilated body. They knew it was beyond all commiseration. And that was enough to make them want to hold each other close, to hold the line against death and destruction. Because they felt more alive together than they did apart. And they knew that that itself was a kind of miracle.
“How did they ID her?” Clevenger asked.
McCormick nodded toward a folding table closer to the stage, where evidence was being tagged. “He left her wallet, license, credit cards—the whole deal, just like the others.”
Clevenger gazed out at the trellis of crisscrossing steel pipes that stretched over the lawn around the pavilion, shimmering under a blazing August sun. He looked back at the stage. “This one’s different.”
McCormick looked at him.
“The other victims were just as prominent,” Clev-enger said. “And he didn’t try to hide their identities, either. But he covered up their bodies. He buried them close to home—a cozy neighborhood park, the beach.” He looked at the crowd around the pavilion. “He’s going public in a big way here.”
“And going faster and faster,” McCormick said. “Three in seven months.”
“He wants attention and he wants it now.”
“Well, he’s got it. National news tonight, every network. If you have anything I can hand up the food chain at the office, let me know. I’ll be getting a call.”
“North says he’s close on financial connections between some of the victims” families. But he needs more time.”
“We tried to run down a few of those leads, too. The trouble is, when you’re talking about families at this level, you get a lot of cross-pollination. They marry each other. They do business together. It’s hard to know whether the connections mean anything, in terms of the murders.”
“Something else connects at least two of the victims.”
“What’s that?”
“What I told you I noticed at the Groupmanns”, I noticed again yesterday with the Hadleys. The absence of grief. They’ve moved right on with their lives. In some ways, both families seem to be doing better than ever.”
“I guess if it is some kind of extreme denial, you could understand it better after sudden deaths, especially murders. Too much shock and horror to bear. Maybe both families were desperate to put it all behind them.”
‘That doesn’t square with other survivors I’ve met.”
‘These people are unusual. They have the money to cover up a lot of their pain. They have family histories that outlive any individual family member—legacies to worry about. It could even be that Groupmann and Hadley were so focused on growing their family’s wealth that they never grew close with their wives or children. The unusual grief reactions could be a side effect of that.”
“I’m not so sure. I think people are people when it comes to death.”
McCormick looked over at Chase Van Myer’s body. “All right. But there has to be an explanation. What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know. But neither man was exactly beloved. Groupmann was a gay man married to a straight woman. He wasn’t much of a father. Hadley was a control freak. He did a major job on his wife and daughters, in terms of their self-esteem.”