The Madman's Tale (37 page)

She seemed to think hard for a moment, then laughed. “Why not?” And then she turned to Francis. “They won’t let Peter in on any questioning I do. Too much baggage comes with him. But you’re different, Francis. I think you should be the one to sit in. It’ll be you and Evans or the big round doctor, himself, because he’s demanding someone be there, and those are the ground rules that Gulptilil set. We create enough smoke, and maybe we’ll see some fire.”

No one, of course, saw what Francis saw, which were the dangers in this approach. But he kept quiet, shushed all the voices within him who were nervous and filled with doubts, and simply bent his shoulders to the course that was created.

Sometimes in the spring, after I’d been released from the Western State Hospital and after I’d settled into my little town, when I went up to the fish ladder to my job helping out the wildlife agency counting returning salmon, I would spot the silvery, shimmering shadows offish and wonder whether they understood that the act of returning to the place where they were spawned, in order to renew the cycle of existence, was going to cost them their lives. With my notebook in hand, I counted fish, often fighting off the urge to warn them somehow. I wondered whether they had some deep, genetic impulse that informed them that returning home would kill them, or whether it was all a deception that they willingly went along with, the desire to mate being so strong that it covered up the inevitability of death. Or were they like soldiers, given an impossible and obviously fatal command, who decide that sacrifice is more important than life?

My hand would shake, sometimes, as I made marks on my counting sheet. So much death passing by in front of me. We get it all wrong, sometimes. That which seems filled with danger, like the great wide ocean, is actually safe. That which is familiar and recognized, like home, is in truth far more threatening
.

Light seemed to fade around me, and I stepped back from the wall, over to the living room window. I could feel the room behind me crowding with memories. There was an evening breeze, just a small breath of warmth. We are all defined by the dark, I thought. Anyone can portray anything in the daylight. But it is only at night, after the world has closed in, that our true selves come out
.

I could no longer tell whether I was exhausted or not. Lifting my eyes, I surveyed the room. It was interesting to me to see myself alone and knowing that it wouldn’t last. They would all crowd in on me, sooner or later. And the Angel would be back. I shook my head
.

Lucy, I remembered abruptly, had drawn up a list of nearly seventy-five names. Those were the men she wanted to see
.

Lucy drew up a list of some seventy-five inmates from throughout the Western State Hospital that seemed to have the potential for killing within them. They were all men who had shown overt hostility toward women, whether it was blows thrown in a domestic-type dispute, threatening language, or obsessive behavior, where they had focused on a female neighbor or family member, and blamed them for their madness. She still secretly clung to the notion that the murders were, at their core, sex crimes. The current thinking in the criminal justice world was that all sex crimes were crimes of violence first, and sexual release a distant second. It didn’t make sense to her to discard everything that she had learned from the moment she had been victimized herself, to the dozens of courtrooms where she had stared across the bar at one man or another, every one of them mirroring in some big or small way, the man who had assaulted her. Her record of convictions was exemplary, and she expected that, despite the obstacles that the mental hospital created, she would succeed once again. Confidence was her calling card.

As she walked across the hospital grounds toward the administration building, she started to draw in her head a portrait of the man she was hunting. Details, such as the physical strength to overwhelm Short Blond, enough youth to be filled with homicidal fervor, enough age so that he was less likely to make rash mistakes. She was persuaded that the man had both a practical knowledge and the sort of innate intelligence that makes certain criminals hard to corner. Her mind churned with all the elements of the crimes that haunted her, and she insisted to herself that when she actually came face-to-face with the right man, she would know him immediately.

The reason for this optimism was the belief she held that the Angel somehow wanted to be known. He would be conceited, she thought, and arrogant, and besting her in this intellectual exercise inside the mental hospital was what he wanted.

She knew this in a way far more profound than Peter or Francis, or for that matter, anyone else at Western State was aware. Several weeks after the second homicide had taken place, the two severed finger joints had been acquired by her office in the most mundane fashion—in the daily mail delivery. The perpetrator had placed them inside a common plastic baggie, sealed up in a tan padded mailer, of the sort available at virtually every office supply store throughout New England. The address on the mailer had been typed on a label, and read simply enough: CHIEF OF SEX CRIMES UNIT.

There had been a single sheet of paper enclosed with the grisly remains. On it had been typed the question:
Looking For These?
and nothing else.

Lucy had been initially confident when the bloody souvenirs had been turned over to forensics. It did not take long to confirm that they belonged to the second victim and that they had been removed postmortem. The typing on the note and the address label were identified as belonging to a 1975 Sears model 1132 electric typewriter. The postmark on the package gave her more hope, because it was narrowed down to the main mail facility in South Boston. In a doggedly efficient style more or less precisely as Peter the Fireman had described, Lucy and two investigators from her office had traced every Sears model 1132 typewriter sold in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont for a six-month period prior to the killing. They had also questioned every postal worker at the mail facility, to see if any could remember handling that particular package. Neither line of inquiry had produced anything resembling a viable lead.

The postal workers had been unhelpful. If a typewriter had been purchased with a check or with a credit card, then Sears had a record. But it was an inexpensive model, and more than a quarter of the machines moved during the time frame had been bought with cash. In addition, the investigators learned that virtually every one of the more than fifty retail outlets in New England had a new model 1132 on display, where it could be tried out. It would have been a relatively simple matter to walk up to a typewriter on a busy Saturday afternoon, stick a piece of paper in the platen, and write whatever one wanted, without drawing the slightest bit of attention to oneself, even from a salesperson.

Lucy had hoped that the man who sent the fingertips would do so again, either with the first victim or the third, but he had not.

It was, she thought, the worst sort of taunting; the message wasn’t in the words, or even the body parts, it was in the delivery that could not be traced.

It had also had the unsettling by-product of sending her to the literature of Jack the Ripper, who had carved out a piece of kidney from a prostitute-victim named Catharine Eddowes aka Kate Kelly and sent it to the Metropolitan Police in 1888 with a mocking note, signed with a flourish. That her quarry was familiar with this most celebrated case made her nervous. It told her much, but it took its toll on her imagination, as well. She did not like the notion that she was hunting a person with a sense of history, because this implied some intelligence. Most of the criminals that she had coldly seen off to prison had been noteworthy for their flat-out stupidity. In the Sex Crimes Unit, it was a bit of a given that the forces that drove a man to the particular act would also cause him to be sloppy and forgetful. The ones that struck randomly and with some planning and foresight were significantly harder to find.

These homicides, she thought, in an odd way, defied characterization. Francis had been accurate, when Peter had asked him what linked them together. But she could not help feeling the sensation that there was something other than hair and body type and savagery that prompted the killings, although she knew that fear defied the conventional wisdom.

She was trudging along outside, on one of the pathways between the hospital buildings, her mind lost in thoughts about the man that Peter and Francis had taken to calling the Angel. She ignored the fine day that had arisen around her, shafts of bright sunshine finding new growth on tree branches, warming the world with its promise of better weather. Lucy Jones had the sort of mind that liked to sort and compartmentalize, that enjoyed the rigorous pursuit of detail, and at that moment, it was excluding the temperature, sunlight, and new growth around her, replacing these simple observations with a continual mental gnawing away at the hurdles she faced. Logic and an orderly application of rules and regulations and laws had sustained her throughout her adult life. What Peter had suggested frightened her, although she had been careful not to show that. And, she acknowledged inwardly, it made some sense, because she was a little at a loss as to how else to proceed. It was a plan, she believed, that reflected his own passion, and not one designed in any rational way.

But Lucy thought of herself as a chess player, and this was as good an opening gambit as she could imagine. She reminded herself to remain independent, which was how she imagined she could control events.

As she walked, head down, deep in thought, she suddenly thought she heard her name.

A single, long, drawn out, whistled “Luuuuuuccccyyyy …” that was carried on a mild spring breeze, lingering in the trees that dotted the hospital grounds.

She stopped abruptly, and pivoted about. There was no one on the path behind her. She looked right, then left, and craned her head forward, listening, but the sound had disappeared.

She told herself that she was mistaken. The noise could have been any of a half dozen other sounds, and that the tension in what she was doing had put her on edge and she had misheard what was really just an ordinary cry of some great internal pain or anguish, no different from any of the hundreds that the wind carried through the world of the hospital every day.

Then she told herself that this was a lie.

It had been her name.

She turned toward the nearest building, and stared up at the windows. She could see some faces of patients looking idly back in her direction. She slowly turned toward other dormitories. Amherst was in the distance. Williams, Princeton, and Yale were closer. She spun about, searching the impassive brick buildings for some telltale indication. But each building remained silent, as if her attention had turned off the spigot of anxiety and hallucination that so often defined the sounds that emanated from each.

Lucy remained rooted to her spot. After a moment, she heard a cascade of obscenities from one building. This was followed by some angry voices and then a high-pitched scream or two. This was what she expected to hear, and with each sound, she told herself that she had heard something that wasn’t there, which, she noted ironically to herself, probably put her in the mainstream of the hospital population. With that thought, she stepped forward, turning her back on every window and every pair of eyes that might have been darkly watching her every step, or might have been staring blankly off into the inviting azure blue sky above. It was impossible to tell which.

P
eter the Fireman stood in the center of the dining room, holding a tray and surveying the bubbling volcanic activity that surrounded him. Mealtimes in the hospital were an unending series of small skirmishes that were a reflection of the great interior wars that each patient fought. No breakfast, lunch or dinner went by without erupting into some minor incident. Distress was served as regularly as runny scrambled eggs or bland tuna salad.