“That’s right. Just make sure the wisdom is not your own, Pastor.”
“I’ll try. This is just incredible!”
“You should go back now, Bill.” Helen strode forward, down the sidewalk, right down Kipling. “I’ve got some praying to do. Besides, we don’t want to get you stranded out here, now, do we?”
“I shouldn’t walk and pray with you?”
“Has God told you to walk and pray with me?”
“No.”
“Then go be a pastor.”
“Okay. Okay, I’ll do that.” Bill turned, feeling as though he should say something brilliant—something commemorative. But nothing came to mind, so he just turned and retraced his steps.
THEY SAY that a split personality develops over years of dissociative behavior. Like a railroad track encountering large, gnarly roots that slowly but inevitably heave it up and split it into two wandering rails. But the development of Kent’s double life was not such a gradual thing. It was more like two high-speed locomotives thundering in opposite directions with a rope tied to the tail end of each. Kent’s mind was stretched there in that high-tension rope.
The persona he presented at the bank returned him to the appearance of normalcy. But during the hours on his own, away from the puppets at work, he was slipping into a new skin. Becoming a new man altogether.
The dreams strung through his mind every night, whispering their tales of brilliance, like some kind of alter ego who’d done this a thousand times and now mentored the child prodigy.
What of the body, Kent? Bodies are evidence. You realize that they will discover the cause of death once they examine that body. And you do need the body—you can’t just sink it to the bottom of a lake like they do in idiotic movies, Kent. You’re no idiot, Kent.
Kent listened to the dreams, wide eyed and fast asleep.
He ingested a steady diet of ibuprofen for the pain that had latched on to his neck. And he began to settle himself with the occasional nightcap. Only they were not so occasional after the third day. They were nightly. And they were not just nightcaps. They were shots of tequila. His taste for the juice that had nearly killed him in college came back like a soothing drug. Not enough to push him into oblivion, of course. Just enough to calm his ragged edges.
When he wasn’t at work, Kent was either poring over research or thinking. A lot of thinking. Mulling the same detail over in his mind a hundred times. Thinking of every possible angle and searching for any loophole he had not considered.
The Discovery Channel had a daily show called
Forensics.
A downtown library had seen fit to catalog fifty consecutive episodes. It was a show detailing actual cases in which the FBI slowly but methodically honed in on criminals using the very latest technology in forensics. Fingerprints, bootprints, hair samples, phone records, perfume, you name it. If a person had been in a room, the FBI experts could almost always find traces.
Almost
always. Kent watched the shows unblinking, his analytical mind tracking all of their weaknesses. And then he would reconsider the smallest details of his plan.
For example. He had already determined that he would have to execute the theft
at
the bank—inside the building. Which meant he would have to get
to
the bank. Question: How? He couldn’t very well have a cab drop him off. Cabs kept records, and any break from routine might lead to a raised eyebrow. He had to keep those eyebrows down. So he should drive his car, of course, the way he always got to the bank. Yes, possibly. On the other hand, cars represented physical evidence. They left tracks. They could be seen by passersby or vagrants, like that one he’d seen in the back alley. Then again, did it matter? What would he do with the car afterward? Drive it away? No, he definitely could not drive off. Cars could be tracked. Torch it? Now, there was a thought. He could leave a five-gallon container of gasoline in the trunk, as if it were meant for the lawn mower at home, and rig a loose wire to detonate the fuel.
Boom!
That was ridiculous, of course. Even a beat cop would suspect the torching of a car. Maybe send it over a cliff with a full tank. Watch it burst into flames on the rocks. Of course, cars rarely actually exploded on impact.
Then again, why rid himself of the car at all?
The car detail consumed hours of drifting thought over the days. And it was the least of his challenges. But slowly, hour by hour, the solutions presented themselves to him. And when they did, when he had tested them in his mind and stripped them of ambiguity, Kent found something he never would have suspected at such discoveries. He found exhilaration. Bone-trembling euphoria. The kind of feeling that makes you squeeze your fists and grit your teeth to keep from exploding. He would pump the air with his right arm, the way he had done not so long before, with Gloria and Spencer giggling at his exuberance over the completion of AFPS.
Without exception, these occasions called for a shot of tequila.
Rarely did he stop long enough to consider the madness of his plan. He had grown obsessed. The whole thing, stealing such an enormous sum of money and then vanishing—starting over—was laced with insanity. Who had ever done such a thing? In a line of a hundred thousand children, it would not be
him
but the one whose mother had mainlined heroin throughout her pregnancy who would be most likely to one day attempt such a feat.
Or the man who had lost his wife, his son, and his fortune in the space of a month.
No, it was more, he thought. It was his savage thirst for what was due him. For a life. For revenge. But more than those things. As a simple matter of fact, there was nothing else that made sense any longer. The alternative of trudging along a new career path on his own sat like lead in his gut. In the end it was this thought that compelled him to throw back the last mouthful of tequila and discard any reservation.
Through it all, Kent maintained a plastic, white-collar grin at the bank, ignoring the knots of anxiety twisting through his gut and the anticipation bursting in his chest. Fortunately, he had never been one to sweat much. A nervous sweater in Kent’s current state would walk through the days dripping on the carpet and changing identical shirts every half-hour in a futile attempt to appear relaxed and casual.
Helen, his religious whacko mother-in-law, saw fit in her eternal wisdom to leave him alone those first two weeks. Which was a small miracle in itself. Helen’s God had performed his first miracle. She did call Kent once, asking if she could borrow some of Gloria’s old tennis shoes. Seemed she had taken to exercise and didn’t see the need to buy a brand-new pair of Reeboks for sixty bucks when Gloria’s were just growing mold in the closet. Why she wanted all four pair, Kent had no clue. He just grunted agreement and told her to come by the next day. They would be on the front porch. When he returned from work, they were gone.
Happy walking, Helen. And if you don’t mind, you may walk right off a cliff.
KENT FOUND his way past the confusion surrounding Lacy Cartwright on a Thursday night fifteen days after their strange meeting, almost three weeks after his decision to rob the bank.
It came at midnight during one of those exhilarating moments just after a key to the entire theft had erupted in his mind like a flare. He thought of Lacy, possibly because the solution igniting his mind’s horizon brought his focus to the future. Post-theft. His new life. Not that Lacy would fit into any new life, heavens no. Still, once her image presented itself, he could not shake it free.
He dialed her listed number with an unsteady hand and sat back.
Lacy answered on the fifth ring, just as he was pulling the receiver from his ear. “Hello?”
“Lacy?”
“Who is this?” She was not sounding too pleased about being called at midnight by a stranger.
“Kent. I’m sorry. Is it too late?”
“Kent?” Her voice softened immediately. “No. I was just going to bed. Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I just thought . . . I just needed someone to talk to.” He paused, but she remained silent.
“Listen to me. Sounds stupid, I know—”
“Lighten up, Kent. I’ve been there, remember? You’re no more
fine
than I am a porcupine.”
He leaned back against the cushions on the sofa and cradled the cordless phone on his neck. “Actually, things are good. Surprisingly good. I’ve got no one in the world to talk to, but apart from that rather insignificant detail, I would say that I’m recuperating.”
“Hmm. How long has it been?” Her voice sounded sweet and soft over the receiver.
“Couple months.” Had he told her about Spencer? Suddenly it was a lump rising in his throat instead of a hard-beating heart. “My son was killed in a hit-and-run four weeks ago.” He swallowed.
“Oh, Kent! I’m so sorry. That’s terrible!” Her voice trembled with shock, and Kent blinked at that. She was right. It was terrible—mind numbing, really. And he was already forgetting the tragedy of it all. So quickly. That made him what? A monster? “How old was your son?”
“Ten.” Maybe this was not such a good idea. She was bringing things back into clear focus.
“Kent, I’m . . . I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah.” His voice sounded unsteady—choked with emotion. Two thoughts slinked through his mind. The first was that this emotion was redemptive—he did care after all; he was not a monster. The second was that the emotion was actually more self-pity than mourning over loss—lamenting the notion that he was indeed a monster.
“I don’t know what to say, Kent. I . . . I think I know how it feels. Have you had any counseling?”
“A therapist? No. But I have a mother-in-law, if that counts.”
She chuckled nervously. “What about a pastor?”
“Religious counsel? There was plenty of that to go around at the funeral, believe me. Enough for a few hundred years, I would say.” What if she was religious? “But no, not really.”
The phone rested silently against his cheek. “Anyway,” he continued. “Maybe we could talk sometime.”
“We’re talking now, Kent.”
The comment caught him off guard. “Yes. We are.” He felt out of control. She was stronger than he remembered. Maybe the comment about religious counsel had been misplaced.
“But we can talk more whenever you’re ready,” she said. “I couldn’t very well turn down an old friend in need, now, could I?” Her voice was soft again. “Really, call me whenever you want to talk. I know the value of talking things through.”
He waited a moment before replying. “Thank you, Lacy. I think I would like that.”
They talked for another half-hour, mostly about incidentals—catching up stuff. When Kent hung up, he knew he would call again. Maybe the next day. She was right: Talking was important, and he had some things he wanted to talk about.
Week Ten
THE FIRST real bump in the road came the following Monday.
Kent sat hunched over a tiny table in the coffee lounge in Barnes and Noble Booksellers after leaving work early to run some “errands”—an activity he knew would quickly outlive its plausibility as a valid excuse for leaving the bank. After all, how many errands could a single man without a life run?
He’d scoured the shelves, found two books, and wanted to make certain they contained the data he was after before making the purchase.
The Vanishing Act
lay at an angle on the green-tiled tabletop before him. The other book,
Postmortem Forensics,
rested open between his hands, spread to a chapter on skeletal remains.
Within five minutes he knew the books were perfect. But he decided to read just a little further in one particular chapter. Like another article he’d gleaned off the Internet suggested, the editor here was confirming that a gunshot wound would not bleed after death. If the pump wasn’t pumping—if the heart wasn’t beating—the blood would not flow. But he already knew that. It was this bit about the effects of high heat to flesh and skeletal remains that had Kent’s heart suddenly drumming steadily.
He flipped the page. Human flesh was rather unpredictable, sometimes flaming to a crisp and other times extinguishing itself midburn. Various accelerants assisted the burning of flesh, but most left a residue easily detected in postmortem forensics. Gasoline, for example, left a detectable residue, as did all petroleum products.
Kent scanned quickly down the page, tense now. What then? If he could be certain of the flesh burning . . . A sentence jumped out at him. “Magnesium is sometimes used by mortuaries to—”
“Excuse me, sir.”
The voice startled Kent, and he snapped the book shut. A middle-aged man sat across from him, smiling past wire-framed glasses. His black hair was swept back neatly, glistening atop a small, pointy head. A pinhead. He was dressed not unlike Kent himself: tailored black suit, crisp white shirt, red tie held snugly by a gold tie bar.
But what had Kent’s pulse spiking was the fact that the stranger now sat down at Kent’s table, elbows down and smiling like he had been here first. That and the man’s piercing green eyes. Like snowboarder Cliff ’s eyes. He sat, stunned, finding no words.
“Hello.” The stranger grinned big. His voice seemed to echo low and softly, as if he’d spoken into a drum. “I couldn’t help noticing that book.
Postmortem Forensics,
huh? Is that the kind of book that tells you how to carve someone up without getting caught?” He chuckled. Kent did not.
The man calmed himself. “Sorry. Actually, I’ve always been rather interested in what happens after death. You mind if I look at the book? I might want a copy myself.” The man stretched out a big tanned hand.
Kent hesitated, taken back by the man’s audacity. He held out the book. Was it possible this man was an agent, somehow on to him?
Relax, Kent. The crime is nowhere but in your mind. He fixed his jaw and said nothing, hoping the man would catch his disinterest.
The stranger scanned through the book and stopped dead center. He flipped the book around and showed a centerfold of a spread-eagle corpse. “Now where do you suppose this man is?” he asked.